


Ghost Story

by avoidingavoidance



Series: The Book of the Dead [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: A lot of cursing, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Hellgate, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blasphemy, Dorks, Explicit Sexual Content, Ghosts, M/M, Masturbation, Nipple Piercings, Piercings, Possession, Priests, Smoking, Suicide, Supernatural - Freeform, Tattoos, implied mobuhan, past jearmin, past suicidality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 21:14:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 107,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidingavoidance/pseuds/avoidingavoidance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Jean Kirschtein, and I have a shit job. I'm basically a garbage man. And by 'garbage' I mean 'very angry dead people.' I guess it has its perks sometimes, though; I get to meet all kinds of interesting people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inadequate Offerings

**Author's Note:**

> new favorite thing ever

To be fair, this is not my first encounter with the supernatural.

Nor the fifth, nor the eleventh.

Actually, I’ve kind of been the accidental shepherd of lost (and usually pissy) souls since I hit my head a little too hard in fourth grade and officially died for a few minutes.

Whoa, sorry, let me back up a little before I let you join me and my shrieking lady friend over here.

My name is Jean Kirschtein. Say it five times fast, you’ll get it sooner or later.

I live in a fairly large city called Trost. You may have heard of it; we’re the ones going bankrupt and firing teachers in order to make enough money to build prisons. We’re also situated over what I like to call a Stygian Fault, deep beneath the earth. Stygian: I stole that word from Dante’s _Inferno_. It means “generally shitty.” 

I call it this because every few years, this thing will act up, getting all infected and cranky, and start spewing some truly awful shit up here in good old rotting, crime-ridden Trost. We’re basically Gotham, if the Joker was the Devil and I was Batman.

Sadly, my mansion is a cheap closet in the bad part of town and my Batmobile is a stolen bicycle. My job doesn’t really pay that well.

Or at all.

Mostly because no one really knows that I do it.

I have friends, and relatives, and whatever, but to all of them I’m the weird mortician that works night shifts ripping tracheas out of corpses two floors under the police department. What they don’t know is that I’m actually the weird mortician that rips tracheas out of hellish hobgoblins behind the Subway on 17th Street. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Jean,” you’re saying as you shake your head sadly. “You are one delusional little motherfucker. I saw that episode on cable like two nights ago. You’re some super handsome hunk that drives around the country, fighting evil by night and stealing credit cards by day, right?” Well, you’re partially correct. Delusional? Maybe. Handsome hunk? Definitely. 

Television?

Fuck what you know.

This isn’t TV. This isn’t fun and games, and this isn’t about damsels in distress. This is real, and this is messy, and this is right here in my backyard. I don’t actually have to move in order to do my job. Good old Trost keeps me busy all hours of the day and night.

Trost is big enough that no one ever has to see me again after I help them out. And if any of my friends were to get infested? Well, you know those mind-eraser things from _Men In Black_?

Nah, I’m fucking with you. I just break into their houses while they’re gone and take care of things.

So, that should about have you up to speed. Handsome, punky-looking guy roams the streets of a big city at night and heroically guts anything that looks out of place. Enough exposition for you?

Good.

\--

Again, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. This is, however, my first experience with an actual, honest-to-whatever haunted _basement_. Usually baddies like to haunt a more popular area of the house, like the bathroom, or that creepy hall closet that you have to scuttle past to get to your bedroom at night. Basements? Nah, they’re too creepy on their own, let alone with angry spirits fucking around in them.

I wince a little as the girl standing in the middle of the room shrieks again, fingers clawing at her face. Ducking down behind my makeshift shield (a shelf she’d thrown at me a little while ago), I try to reason myself through the situation. She wants something, clearly, and whatever it is, it’s down here somewhere.

Taking a deep breath, I look out from behind the splintered wood. She hasn’t moved except for her knees knocking together under the force of her own torment. Her sharp nails claw at the skin under her eyes and dark blood squirts over her pale skin, matting her black hair. 

She’s really A+ nightmare material, this girl. And she’s _pissed_. 

I look around the room again, trying to find the locus of her rage. A brick wiggles loose from the wall and flies up into the cheap fluorescent light staining the basement a sickly white, and the dying sparks are the last of the remaining light.

Shit.

I suck in a breath and the girl stops screaming. 

Shit, shit shit shit.

She straightens up, her bloody hands falling to her sides.

And then she’s on me.

I yelp and fall back on my ass, holding her at arm’s length with the board. She’s staring at me from over the splintering wood, eyes wide and half-clawed out of her skull, and she’s emitting this truly horrifying gurgle. Her hands scrabble at either side of the shelf, trying to get at me, and the gurgling grows louder.

“Listen!” I swallow and scoot backwards across the dirty floor, but she presses harder against the wood, nostrils flaring. Blood drips down the board. “Listen, I can help you, but you have to stop trying to kill me!”

She opens her mouth and a sobbing shriek comes out, somewhat muffled against the board. I can feel her knees between mine, twitching and tensing, and I really hope she doesn’t kick me.

“Come on, I’m the only one still here,” I sputter, trying to reason with her. Her eyes roll and a piercing wail follows, her scrambling, ataxic fingers moving to yank at her dirty, bloody hair. She pushes again, and we slide further along the floor. “Please let me help you.” I lower my voice, looking at her damaged face. Last resort. I lick my lips and give her a soft gaze. “I want to help. Will you let me?”

She backs off finally, falling over onto her side, draped over my thigh. Soft sobs wrack her thin body, but they’re different from the ones that had filled the basement just moments ago. She sounds young now, and pained, rather than rage-filled. I think about just how little she looks.

The board drops slowly, and I lean it against the wall. I reach a trembling hand toward her, palm up, like I’m trying to approach an angry cat. Her little form has curled around my thigh now, and the other leg is awkwardly splayed to the side to make room for her. Shaking with sobs between my legs, she aims a look at me from under her tangled hair. Her face is still covered with blood, but the scratches are gone.

I smile gently at her, but make no move to touch her. I know better. “It’s over there, right?” I nod my head at the missing brick. She shudders; not just her body, but her whole existence. It’s a kind of phasing movement unique to the damned. Like you’re looking really hard at something, but you’re really tired, so your eyes start shaking uncontrollably. Another shudder and she’s gone, no longer chilling my thigh. She’s kneeling in front of the missing brick and crying softly. I’m starting to feel really bad at this point, but I stand carefully and brush myself off.

“What are you looking for?” I move slowly, not making any sudden movements or loud noises. “Is it there? Do I need any tools?”

She doesn’t reply. She just curls in on herself and shivers, looking for all the world like the lost little girl she was at some point. I move next to her and cautiously lean around her, shaking fingers digging into the space left by the brick. A sharp inhale from hip-level informs me that my aim is off. I look down at her out of the corner of my eye. Less than a foot away from me, her frantic eyes search the wall.

“Okay,” I sigh, carefully sitting next to her. “Okay,” I repeat, and I start feeling at the bricks around it.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, apart from her sniffles. She’s wiping the blood on her white face around, not really making any move to get rid of it. 

Finally, my fingers hit a chipped indent in one of the bricks. A slow exhale from my left, followed by a quiet whimper. I stick my tongue out a little in concentration and pick at the ancient mortar holding the crumbling stone in place. Finally, the brick wiggles, and I give a sigh of relief. I really don’t think she’d like it if I’d pulled a knife to try and pry the damn thing out.

I give a good tug and the brick comes out, and she perks right up onto her dirty knees. There’s no hidden hollow in the brick, so I drop it and reach my hand into the empty space. I can feel a soft rippling around my fingers. So that’s why she was so frustrated; sometimes when things are hidden and someone doesn’t want them to be found, they hide in a little bubble. The bubble prevents the dead from reaching the object.

I find that it’s usually things that are hidden from their rightful owners that have this power. That’s why I call them asshole bubbles. They’re filled with ill intent.

I reach in further, brow furrowing, and my hand hits something tangled and… hairy.

Aw, sick.

I pull out the thing, and the girl gives a soft sob, tears spilling down her cheeks. Of course. It’s a little doll, made with her own hair. People back in the day, I tell you. It’s like they were _trying_ to get violently haunted.

“Is this it?” I turn to her and show her the doll. It’s small and dirty, but the tears falling down her face tell me that it’s the one thing she treasured most in her short life. Thus the rage. Old anger festers, you see.

I hold it out to her, and her shaking fingers come up and take it from me. Her mouth falls open on a sigh, and she brings the doll to her heart, curling around it and rocking back and forth. I smile. It’s almost cute, even with the attempted homicide. 

“Will you go home now?” I duck my head to try and catch her eye. She blinks slightly, then looks at me and nods. She stands then, doll clutched tightly to her chest, and gives me a lopsided curtsy. I lean back on my hands and watch her turn toward the adjacent wall.

Her door is just her height and painted a soft pink that doesn’t at all match the shitty, dirty look of the basement.

I close my eyes as her little hand meets the comically large doorknob. I don’t like to watch; it feels too personal.

When the door closes again, I open my eyes and look around the dark basement.

That’s about the point that I hear footsteps above my head.

Shit.

I scramble to my feet and jump onto an old filing cabinet, hurriedly opening the basement window and hauling myself through.

I don’t stop running until I’m safely three blocks away; I slow to a quick walk and try to look really chill, folding my hood up with a glance around. I jog down the stairs to the subway, pay my fare, and run to the train, jumping through the doors just as they close.

\--

Yeah, so a bulk of my job consists of breaking and entering. I never take anything, honest! Well, maybe a beer if I think I can swing it. It’s for their own good, though. Seriously, some of the things I weed out of peoples’ houses can get real nasty if you leave them. 

How do I find them, you ask?

Well, a good magician never reveals their secrets, I might say. 

Truth is, I do have one or two friends in the industry. They’re hella cranky, but what can you do? It’s what the job does after a while.

Erwin Smith is the night manager of the shitty Target down in southern Trost. He’s also Levi’s caretaker, for better or for worse. They don’t fight often, but when they do, whoof. 

Levi’s probably the best psychic this side of the Mississippi. He’s not happy about that. Would you be? Honestly. 

I roll up at the shipping entrance of the superstore and find Levi leaning against the wall next to a propped-open service door. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking a little worse for the wear.

“Hey,” I say, announcing my presence and pulling my hood up a little. The misting rain is starting to make my hair more than a little damp. I run my fingers through my bangs, flopping them wetly to the side. “Can I bum one?”

“Tch,” Levi responds, leveling me with a pissy glare. He holds out his pack anyway, though. I take one and light it with the lighter tucked inside, then hand them back. 

“Where’s Erwin?”

“How should I know?” Levi leans his head against the wall and exhales slowly. “Probably shitting. It’s about that time of night.”

I just shake my head, leaving the cigarette between my lips as I check my phone. He still hasn’t responded to my text. “I finished that job in North Trost,” I mumble around the cigarette, pausing to take a good, long hit. “You got any other hits?”

Levi chuckles drily. “Of course I do. Shitty hell hole’s acting up again.”

I groan and lean against the wall on the other side of the door. “It’s been doing that for weeks. It’s gotta pass over soon, school starts up in a month.” I’m not a student. I teach anatomy labs at the medical school. You know, when I’m not getting my ass handed to me.

Levi shrugs. He takes his cigarette between his fingers and is about to speak, but the service door bangs open and nearly crushes me against the wall. I yelp and block the swinging metal with my forearms. “Hey!”

Eren’s dopey face peers around the door. “Oh, hey Jean,” he says, then turns to Levi. “Don’t you have your radio on?”

Levi snorts and flicks his ashes. 

“Um, Erwin was calling for you. He wants to count out your till,” Eren says, fingers wrapped around the door. I move away from the danger zone and finish my cigarette. Levi nods, and he and Eren have one of their gay little wordless eye contact conversations. Eren turns to me and smiles. “Haven’t seen you in a while. You thinking of coming back to work?”

I snort and grind the filter under my heel. “And have to see your face every night? Kill me.” I don’t know what it is about this kid that makes me want to pick fights, but it happens more than I’d like to admit. A lot, okay, a lot.

A shadow passes over Eren’s face, but he doesn’t take the bait. He just turns and goes back inside to do whatever it is he does.

I wait the customary amount of time before I turn to Levi. “You haven’t told him yet?”

Levi levels me with a “mind your own fucking business or you’ll be getting dumpster monsters for a week” kind of look, so I raise my hands and take a step back. He looks me over for a second longer, then sighs and digs in his pocket. As he hands me a torn-off piece of receipt paper with a hastily-scrawled address on it, my phone starts buzzing in my pocket.

“This one pays,” Levi says shortly. “Thirty for you, thirty for Erwin, and forty for me.”

“Aw, what?” I give Levi a little whine, which works about as well as it usually does. “How come I get the same cut as Erwin? I’m the one doing all the dirty work.”

Levi smirks a little and doesn’t answer. He just moves back into the store room and kicks away the brick doorstop. The handle-less, heavy red metal slams shut, and I pull out my ringing phone.

“Hey, Connie,” I say, injecting some cheer into my voice. I shove my other hand into my pocket and head back toward my apartment. “What’s up?”

“Someone’s in a good mood,” comes the loud response. I can hear Sasha in the background, and maybe a few other people.

“Yeah,” I say, turning onto the main street, but not before my customary shady glance around. “I got off work a little early tonight.”

“Nice! You can come over then!”

I sigh and wait to cross the street, squinting up at the mist twisting through the streetlight. “I dunno, man, I’m a little beat.”

“No way,” Connie says firmly. I can almost hear him pointing an accusing finger at me. “We’re gonna play cards, and you’re gonna come have a few beers and a good time. We haven’t seen you in like two weeks. All you do is sleep and play with dead things.”

I chuckle quietly. Oh, Connie, if only you knew. “Alright, you got me. Your place?”

“Nah, Sasha’s.”

“You mean they’re not one and the same?”

Connie sputters a little, and his voice sounds a little like he’s cupping a hand around his mouth when he replies. “Chill, man, her lease is up next month, I’ll ask her then.”

I roll my eyes. “Fine. I’m heading into the subway, I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Alright,” comes the reply, and before I hang up I can hear Connie yelling something about ‘great success.’ His Borat impression isn’t terrible.

I stuff my phone in my pocket and jog into the subway. The tunnels are an absolute signal dead zone, so no texting or talking or Facebook. Nothing. Once you hit those stairs, it’s game over. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Honestly, I think there’s some kind of infestation in the subways again. I remember clearing a few weird little _taotie_ out from around King’s Ave a few years ago; they’d been eating the third rail and clogging up the subway lines. Finding out what eats cell phone signal, though, might take a little heavy research. 

I sink into the hard plastic seat on the grungy subway car, grimacing at the warmth. Are the seats heated, or is it residual butt heat? The immortal question. 

Getting to Sasha’s place from the subway isn’t hard, but I’ll be damned if she doesn’t live in a troublesome neighborhood. Kappas live in the sewers down her street, and when it rains you can pretty much hear them plotting. They like to fuck with the water supply. I’d try to do something about it, but honestly no one complains that much, and it’s way more than a one-man job. The people around here just know better than to drink the tap water at this point. That’s fine enough for me.

I try not to notice as their little black flippers reach up out of the storm grates, hunching my shoulders against the strengthening rain and walking a little faster.

Sasha throws the door open with a wide grin and pulls me inside by the front of my damp hoodie. I realize that I’d forgotten to stop and buy cigarettes, but it’s not like I can smoke them in her house anyway. I’ll get some on the way home.

“Mr. Warm Bodies is here,” Sasha calls as she drags me through the house, little hand still fisted in my hoodie. I stuff myself into a ratty chair next to the couch and nod my greetings to Connie, Bert, Reiner, and Annie. 

Sasha reappears at my side and hands me a beer before moving to sit on the arm of the couch next to Connie. He moves his arm behind her and tugs her into his lap, laughing at her loud yelp. I smile and raise my beer to them before taking a swig.

Ahh, sustenance.

I listen to them resume their conversation, Reiner loudly debating the finer points of _The Matrix_ as a trilogy. This is comfortable; it’s nice. It’s a good way to unwind after getting my ass handed to me by a pissy little girl.

Like I said, I do have friends. I just kind of have to lie to them a little. It’s better if Connie never finds out that it was a poltergeist, not raccoons, that trashed his apartment while he was on vacation, and if Bert never has to think about the teenage suicide pact that had been haunting his attic. (Turns out all they wanted after death was to get really high. They’d never managed it, and their home lives all sucked enough that they crowded in the one kid’s attic bedroom and drank bleach to escape all the shit being flung at them. I had pity and smoked them out like kings. Bert had complained about the smell for a week.)

I laugh with them and don’t feel at all out of place. I make something up about work, and they laugh and make appropriately disgusted sounds as I talk.

Alright, maybe I feel a little out of place, but it’s a necessary evil. 

The cards come out, and we play a few good and dirty rounds of that Cards Against Humanity game. It’s a really twisted game, definitely a good time.

It’s midnight when I finally dump my three beer bottles in the recycling and hug Sasha goodbye. Bert and Annie shuffle a boisterous Reiner out the door, and I turn down the short blonde’s offer of a ride home. She just shrugs and closes Sasha’s door behind her.

Before I can leave, though, Connie tosses a paper airplane at me from the couch.

“Hey, whatever happened to that girl you were seeing?”

I blink at him, honestly drawing a blank. Oh, wait. Pigtails. “Mina?”

“Yeah, what happened with her?”

I shrug, stuffing my hands in my pockets. Honestly, she had thought I was cheating on her. Yeah, of course. Cheating on her with a particularly ferocious wendigo. Fucker had required multiple trips (and multiple ass-beatings on both counts) to finally get rid of him. “She said I didn’t have enough time for her.” The image of her dark, angry eyes flashing at me in the dim light of my room pops into my head. Never mind that I was limping at the time. “I guess we just weren’t working,” I say finally, realizing Connie is still waiting for me to speak. 

“Man, you need to come around more often,” Connie says, leaning back into the couch. Sasha nods and moves to sit next to him, their fingers twining. They should just get married already. I smile and run a hand through my hair.

“Sorry, work’s been really busy lately,” I say, and it pains me that this isn’t a lie. 

They let me go and I lock the door behind me, my thumb tracing a little ward in the rain drops above the outside lock. It’s not much, but painting weird shit on my friend’s door might be frowned upon. 

I make it back to my closet and collapse into bed just after one, making sure to at least kick off my shoes and set my alarm. The receipt paper that Levi had given me is still stuck to my phone, adhered to the screen with a few drops of water.

_‘750 S 16th St, gaki’_ the paper says. I grimace at the last word, then roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. Great. Gaki are these really gross spirits afflicted by an endless, insatiable hunger as penance for their sins in life. Or something.

What they really are, are fat little skeletons that eat everything they can get their hands on, until they run out of stuff to eat.

That’s usually when they turn to the human snack supply.

I pull my thin pillow over my face with a groan. 

Tomorrow’s gonna be great.

\--

I roll out of bed around noon and immediately cross yesterday off my wall calendar. Only three weeks until the semester starts up again. The damn fault had better be long closed by then, I think.

I wring enough hot water out of the depths of the building to manage a quick shower. It goes cold halfway through, but hey. Saves me money on coffee, I guess.

My phone chimes annoyingly as I button up my jeans, and I answer with a gruff “What” around a mouthful of toast.

“Um, I’m sorry, hi, is this Jean?”

I blink at my phone. “Depends,” I say finally, taking another chomp of the slightly soggy bread I’m calling breakfast.

“Ah.”

A silence. Seriously?

“Well, um, if you see him, can you leave a message for me?”

I pull the phone away from my head so I can shove it through a shirt. I pull the worn fabric down over my stomach and direct my full attention to the phone, cramming the last of my toast into my mouth.

“Shoot.”

“Okay.” Whoever this guy is, he sounds nervous. I wonder briefly if he’s my client for today. “Um, just let him know that my… my problem is getting a little… insistent.”

Yeah, definitely my client. “Look, I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I say as I shove my feet into my shoes and shrug into a hoodie. “Can you hold on until then?”

“U-u-um,” comes the shaky reply. A yelp, then, a little further away, and what sounds like a phone falling down some stairs. I’m already running down my building’s narrow stairs, taking them three at a time. “No, I don’t think so,” the guy yells from a little further. I curse and shove my phone back in my hoodie; no use trying to yell back at him. I unlock my battered bike, thanking my lucky stars that it had survived another night without being dismantled, and pedal north like my life depends on it. It doesn’t, but someone’s does.

750 South 16th Street, as it turns out, is a run-down little church. I ride through the gate, standing on the pedals, and jump off just before I hit the door. Leaving the bike, wheel spinning, on the lawn, I bust into the narthex. 

It’s weirdly quiet. 

I curse a little and realize that I totally forgot to bring any kind of offering. Damn. 

There’s half a Snickers bar in my hoodie pocket. Somehow I doubt that’s enough. 

I look around the entryway, searching for the most likely hunting ground for a hungry spirit. 

The sound of fabric ripping catches my attention, and I bolt to the left, jumping over a little gate and into the world’s dinkiest stairway. The ripping sound continues behind a sliding wood door, which is open just a fraction. I can hear what sounds like soft whimpers underneath that, but mostly what I hear is chewing.

I fucking hate gaki.

I crouch on the last stair before the doorway and peer through the crack. There’s a guy sprawled on the ground, wearing black robes and half of a bright blue vestment. He’s got his face buried in his hands, and he looks like he’s trying to scrabble away along the floor without looking at whatever’s attacking him.

Observing the rest of the dirty storage room, I notice that the other half of his holy tablecloth is currently being chewed on in earnest by a shrunken little mummy with a fat stomach. Great. 

Armed with my half Snickers, I stand and slide the door open. “Oi, gaki,” I say, definitely not trying to sound cool. It doesn’t respond, just chewing voraciously and staring with huge eyes at the priest, crouched much too close to him for anyone’s comfort. I raise an eyebrow and try again. “Preta?” No response. I strain my memory. “Peik-ta?” The thing stops momentarily, freezing up in response to my heavily-accented Burmese address. It turns its head toward me, emaciated jaws resuming their frantic gnawing.

I sigh and pull the wrapper off the chocolate. “What about this, buddy?” I wave it around, looking around the room as I do. The dirt floor is mostly obscured by random shit, but the architecture is old. I can see several vaults at the end of a long hallway. The huge door of the main vault creaks open, and in the darkness is a single, broken chair.

Oh, no. Fuck this place and everything about it. I focus my eyes on the priest, shivering a little, and notice that the guy’s robes are heavily torn. He’s lucky the gaki is only after his vestment. 

Speaking of which, the thing is swallowing heavy, wet mouthfuls of fabric and looking at me over its shoulder with a demented, haunted starvation in its eyes. I bend my knees a little and hold out the now-melting chocolate. “Doesn’t this look better than that old table cloth?” I lick my lips and try to look disarming as I shuffle around toward the priest. The gaki’s huge eyes don’t leave me or my offering, its head moving slightly to track my movements.

“You want this?” I feel a little ridiculous. The priest is squinting at me between his fingers, trying not to alarm the spirit crouched next to him, chewing on his clothes. I notice a broken pair of glasses on the floor between them. So much for those. Hope God has good insurance.

I finish my wide circle and end up just behind the priest, with the gaki between us and the door. The thing slows its chewing and swallows, the blue fabric poking out from between its shriveled lips. Its distended belly pokes out between its naked thighs, crouching flat on its bony feet. Its hands hang loose at its sides. 

The damned thing has yet to blink. Seriously, I _hate_ gaki.

Licking my lips, I look down at the priest. He’s a lot younger than I’d assumed, I notice, and his black hair is dusty and messy. 

“Hey, peik-ta,” I say. “How about this. I’ll give you this and a nice long prayer if you leave this nice man alone.” Like talking to a dog. Or a small child. I’m not honestly a hundred percent sure on the distinction. The thing doesn’t seem to like this idea, as it starts chewing rapidly again, slobbering a little in its rush. “Whoa, hey, okay, fine.” I stop to think, my eyes flicking down the hallway to the open vaults. I can already see something crouched on the chair. 

My shoulders tense, and I’m suddenly filled with the urge to bolt out of here and never look back, with or without the holy man. Whatever’s down here, the gaki is probably the least of many issues. Those vaults are bad news, I can tell you that much.

“Okay,” I say again, looking at the panicky-looking gaki. _Please blink_ , I think to myself. “Look, I don’t have any flowers or anything,” I start, but a small whimper distracts me. The priest is peering up at me, still through his fingers.

His voice, muffled by his palms, comes out shaky. “There’s some in the chest… b-behind you.”

I bite my lip, still holding out the Snickers. It’s starting to slide down my fingers as it melts. “Are they real?”

The priest just gives a terrified squeak.

“… Do they look real?”

I can almost see the guy sweating bullets, wide brown eyes staring desperately up at me. The stole, still draped over one of his shoulders, gives a jerk as the gaki stuffs more of it into its jowls, and the priest squeaks again. We don’t really have another choice at this point.

The chest he’d mentioned can only be this huge crate behind me, the kind of shit pirates leave buried under a giant red X in the sand. I fumble with the catch and haul it open, its hinges creaking, and pull out an extremely dusty, dully-colored bouquet. “Seriously?” I say, shaking the dust off. 

The priest sniffles a little. “They were in the window for too long,” he finally murmurs, eyes flicking from me to the flowers. He’s desperately not looking at the thing chewing on his clothes.

I turn back to the noisily chomping spirit. Seriously, how long is this damn scarf? As I stand up a little straighter, I realize with a chill that the scene is being closely observed, and not by any participating party. Our clock is ticking. I purposely do not look toward the vault again.

“Okay, so I have food and flowers,” I say to the thing, crouching a little and offering it both. The thing stares and chews, stares and chews. _**Please** blink._ Its belly is lumpy with scarf and god knows what else. “Is that okay?” Slurp, slurp, slurp. “Food, flowers, and a prayer?” It pauses. I do too, realizing that I have completely forgotten the one Burmese remembrance prayer I knew. “Um, I only know one in Chinese,” I start, but the thing is already screaming, its fingers clamped over its ears. The sound is grating and muffled, escaping around a throatful of scarf, and it bounces agitatedly on its heels.

“Okayokayokay,” I yell over it, trying to make a placating gesture around my offerings. The priest had rolled onto his side, burying his face in what remains of his stole and stammering out high-pitched prayers. The fabric is yanked away from him as the gaki stuffs the rest of the scarf into its cheeks and stands. It levels a hungry look at me, its huge round eyes widening further, and I cautiously step toward it, over the shaking priest. 

“I’m sorry,” I say in what I hope is a soothing voice, hands still in front of me. My right hand is covered with chocolate, I note with disdain. “I’m sorry, okay? I just… I forgot the Burmese one.” The thing growls a little, still working its way through its mouthful. Its gaze shifts, though, to the melting candy in my hand. I wave it around a little bit, dropping the sun-bleached flowers to the dirty floor. “You want this?” I lick my lips and step the rest of the way over the priest, effectively putting him behind me. 

We’re only going to get one shot at this.

The gaki gnaws its way through the last mouthful of vestment as I reach behind me and fist my hand in his tattered black robes. He yelps, and the gaki twitches, and I murmur something soothing in whatever language comes to mind first. It seems to object less to Thai, I notice dimly. I yank on the priest’s robes insistently, and I hear him stand behind me, but I don’t let go yet. 

Swallowing noisily, the gaki’s cheeks return to their hollow state, and the thing lets out a moan of hunger.

“You want this,” I say again, more of a statement. “I’ll just leave it,” I tug a little on the priest’s robes and really hope he gets the picture. “Over _there!_ ” I chuck the chocolate down the hall, toward the vault, and the thing runs after the sweaty chocolate at an insane pace. I’m not one to waste time, so I bolt for the sliding door, dragging the priest behind me as I go. When we clear the threshold, I bodily toss the guy onto the stairs and haul all my weight into slamming the door shut. The door clicks shut, and I’m already using the chocolate on my hand to trace a ward on the shitty wood. The priest is up, then, slamming a padlock onto a latch above the handle. He clicks the thing shut, then collapses back onto the stairs.

I lean my head against the door and sigh. Fucking gaki, dude. They’re awful. Hungry and picky and so oversensitive to every little thing.

The thing that worries me more, though, is the fact that there were a few open vaults down there, and they all seemed some degree of occupied.

I turn to the priest, who’s breathing heavily and wringing his hands. Dude’s covered in freckles. They stand out dark on his pallid cheeks. He looks up at me and squints a little. I remember the broken glasses on the floor. 

Extending my non-chocolatey left hand to the guy, I try my best to give him a soothing smile. Paying customer and all. “Jean Kirschtein,” I say. “Supernatural janitor.”

Despite himself, the priest laughs and accepts my awkward lefty shake. “Marco Bodt,” he replies. “Confused priest.”

“I bet,” I say, dragging my clean hand through my hair. “How long has that been going on?”

Marco stands and heads up the precarious stone stairs, unlatching the little metal gate with slightly less shaky hands. “I started hearing chewing sounds a few months ago.” I pull a napkin out of the back pocket where my wallet is supposed to be and curse slightly. No cigarettes yet, then. As I clean my fingers, Marco continues. He’s still wringing his hands a little. “I thought it was rats… but then a lot of the church’s food for the Christmas food drive started going missing. Whole cans, mind you, and I don’t think rats eat those.”

I hum in acknowledgement and start toward the door. “So what happened today?”

“I went down there to get something from the vault.” He gives a shaky laugh. “Can’t for the life of me remember what.”

I stuff my now-clean hands in my pockets and look around the narthex. This place really blows. “And it tackled you?”

“Yes,” he replies, pulling at the scraps of fabric hanging off of his robes. He grimaces. “It… it really ate my vestment, huh?”

Despite myself, I laugh long and loud. “Yeah, gaki will do that. They’re hungry, you see. Always hungry, until they’re put out of their misery.”

Marco sighs and runs a hand through his dusty, messy hair. “What is a gaki?” He pauses. “And how do I get it out of my church?”

I sigh, scratching my stubbly cheek. That’s what I forgot to do this morning, shave. “It’s a hungry spirit. That one was Burmese. What it’s doing here of all places, I have no idea, but there it is. As for removing it…” I crack my knuckles and lace my fingers together on top of my head, flattening my messy blonde hair. “You got some problems, Padre. I think you should just abandon ship, honestly.”

Marco’s shoulders slump. He bites his lip and stares at the floor. “I can’t leave this church,” he says finally, taking a deep breath. “The community really needs it, you know?” He considers me for a moment, and frankly, I’m feeling a little nervous. “If I can pay you more…”

“Nooo, nonono,” I say quickly, putting my hands on my hips. I feel like the movement makes me look a little weird, though, so I just stuff my hands into my pockets again. “Sorry, Padre, but you have some seriously bad things happening down there. I’d have to be suicidal to try that myself.”

Marco looks at me with this weird mix of desperation and hope. “You’re not alone! You have me!”

I shake my head slowly, shoulders relaxing a little. “It’s more complicated than that. I have some pretty bad feelings about that vault there.”

“…pt,” comes the muffled reply, and I arch an eyebrow.

“What was that?”

Flushing a little, Marco twiddles his fingers. “It’s a crypt.”

I throw my hands in the air. “Fantastic.” I scratch the back of my head. “Excellent.” 

We stand there for a little longer, neither of us daring to look at the slightly-wobbling door tucked into the corner. The little metal gate sectioning off the stairs looks almost absurd compared to the outright badness that’s threatening to come up out of it.

“Listen, Padre, let me walk you home,” I say, extending the olive branch. Marco shakes his head.

“I’m not a Father,” he says. “I’m a reverend. You can just call me Marco, though.”

I nod. “Okay, Marco,” I say. “Let me walk you home.”

He smiles and scratches his head, and for some reason I’m feeling nervous again.

“I, uh. I live above the sanctuary.” He points to the wide, white doors behind us. “So it’s not really that far.”

I stare at the doors for a moment, then back to Marco, before marching right over to them and opening one wide.

It doesn’t take more than half a second’s glance to convince me that Marco must really be fucking blind. I slam the door shut again and turn to face him, shoulders tense. “No,” I say simply. He blinks at me, and I shake my head. “No fucking way, Pad—Marco. Have you opened your eyes lately?”

He licks his lips and flushes a little, rubbing a finger under his nose. “I just thought, you know… sometimes when cars go by, their shadows move along the walls…”

I look at him incredulously and point over my shoulder, mouth hanging open. “Cars,” I manage finally.

\--

Let me break this down for you really fast. I looked into that damn sanctuary for half a second and counted two more gaki lounging around the aisles, looking miserable. 

Oh, and six humanoid spirits, three _taotie_ , a kappa bouncing around in a fountain, four fucking will-o’-the-wisps, and some hazy giant that I don’t even really want to think about.

_Cars_ , Marco Bodt says. Cars.

\--

In the end, Marco agrees to come with me and stay at my apartment for a while. To be honest, the guy seems way too nice for me to let him get gored in a house of God. And he hasn’t paid me yet.

He pulls off his tattered robe and finds, with dismay, that his t-shirt underneath had been torn too. I chuckle a little when I notice that he’s wearing jeans and dirty chucks under his holy attire. Marco blushes, pulling at the torn fabric of his t-shirt. “No one notices when I’m at the lectern,” he mumbles bashfully. “I guess I’m a little unorthodox.”

I nod, still chuckling, and lead the way out of the building. Marco locks it, and I look up at the sky, silently requesting that it hold off on the downpour until I’m at least most of the way home.

“Oh, I still didn’t pay you,” Marco says behind me, fishing out his wallet and digging out a few crumpled bills. I don’t bother counting it, just shoving it in my hip pocket. “Um, thanks again for your hospitality,” he continues, looking at the wet grass.

“Don’t worry about it,” I mumble, hauling my stolen bicycle off the lawn and righting it. I wonder briefly if the bike would protest were Marco to ride on the pegs. Probably. I sigh and run a hand through my hair. “Sit.” I point at the seat. He looks at me, confused.

“What are you going to ride?” I give him a stare and refuse to dignify that with a response. “Oh,” he says finally, catching on. He has the good grace to turn red, moving to sit as far back on the seat as he can. 

I look over his shoulder and investigate his torn shirt, noticing that he has some goosebumps around the scabbing scratches across his shoulder. I remove my hoodie wordlessly and push it into his face, trying to drown out any muffled politeness he might have for me.

It’s unseasonably warm, I notice, swinging my leg over his lap and moving to stand on the pedals. I don’t even need to roll down the sleeves of my flannel.

A few laggy starts later and we’re on our way, Marco’s hands resting primly on my waist as I ride the pedals back in the direction of my apartment. 

I hop off when we arrive a few minutes later, kicking my sore legs a little and moving to chain the bike to a street sign, right under the little sign that says “DO NOT LOCK BIKES HERE.” Marco hops off too and lets his hands rest in the hoodie’s pockets, looking around like he hasn’t left the damn church in years. I turn toward the corner store and gesture for him to follow.

The bell above the door rings as I barge into the corner store, my eyes scanning for the drink fridges. A gruff holler comes from behind the cramped deli at the back, and I return the sentiment with a grunt of my own. Big Joe never has been one for intellectual conversation. I grab a few cans of Coke and look at Marco, who’s studying the shelves with a narrow squint. “Do you want anything?” I ask, closing the fridge door before it starts to hum angrily. Damn old fridges.

“Oh, um, I can get it,” Marco says, jumping a little and moving to grab his wallet. I wave my hand, though, and he tilts his head.

“You just got evicted by evil,” I explain. “Let me get it.”

He smiles softly and digs the toe of his shoe into the worn linoleum. “Thanks.”

“So pick something, go on,” I say, nodding toward the fridge. I honestly expected him to get water or something, but he smiles widely and grabs one of those monstrous Jolt cans of Monster. Okay then. I turn in the narrow aisle, tripping a little over some bags of kitty litter, and scan the slim macaroni selection. Half of the boxes are in Spanish, but I find the gooey Velveeta terribleness I’d been craving since this morning with an accomplished sound. I can hear Marco chuckling a little.

We toss our haul on the plastic counter, and a gum-chewing little Spanish princess looks up at us from her nails.

“And a pack of Marlboro menthols,” I say, reaching into my pocket for the crumpled bills stuffed toward the bottom.

The girl pops a bubble and hollers back to Joe in Spanish. “ _Your tenant’s got a new boyfriend_ ,” she says, clearly not remembering that I speak Spanish just fine, thank you. I smile at her and grab the bag she’s offering me. 

“ _At least I only have one_ ,” I respond, rolling my tongue around soft syllables just to be a showoff. Her eyes widen, as does my smile, and Joe guffaws from behind a huge ham. “ _Do you have matches?_ ”

She hands them over wordlessly, eyes moving between me and Marco. I turn on my heel and leave the store, hollering a goodbye to Joe. Marco trails along behind me, chuckling and looking a little flushed.

I stop outside the door to my building and fish around for my cigarettes. As I slap them against my palm, I study Marco. “So you’re, like, what… ten? Eleven?”

Marco laughs jovially, digging in the bag for his giant sugary beverage. “Har har,” he responds as he rips the plastic off and opens it. It makes a sound akin to a gunshot, and we both jump. “I’m 27,” he continues, sipping the odious green ooze. 

I raise my eyebrows. “You’re actually older than me?” He tilts his head and smiles. “I’m 26,” I mumble, ripping the plastic off my pack and popping it open. I only struggle with the matches a little before managing to light my cigarette with a contented sigh.

“Funny how that works,” he says, tapping a finger against his can. 

We chat idly for a while as I finish my cigarette, and I swear I can see him getting hyper. I wonder how often he actually drinks that shit, and whether he knows what he’s gotten into with that huge-ass can.

I lead him up to my apartment, and he sinks onto my ratty couch with a sigh. I drop the rest of the stuff onto my one counter and dig out a can of Coke. I collapse heavily next to him on the couch, resting my feet on the ancient, salvaged coffee table. 

It’s nice to relax, finally, and just as I sigh and open my soda, the power gives a high hum and then goes out. Lovely.

“I paid my bill,” I say, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. Grey, rainy light filters in from the dirty window. 

He smiles and leans into the couch, turning to look out the window. Thunder cracks somewhere in the distance. “I guess the building’s just taking a break,” he murmurs, and I give him a lopsided smile.

My phone chimes from the hoodie pocket, scaring the life out of Marco. I laugh at him and dig the noisy thing out, picking it up and holding it to my ear.

Before I can say anything, Levi’s growling into my ear and sounding rather like shit warmed over. “We have a problem,” he says, and I can practically hear him chain-smoking.

“Yeah?”

“You know how the fault’s been acting up?”

I think briefly about the excessively haunted church I’d just rescued Marco from. “That’s putting it lightly.”

“Yeah. Did you do that job yet?”

I laugh drily. “Yeah, and it’s pretty fucked up. You wouldn’t belie—”

“The rift’s there.”

I pause. My mouth goes dry. I swallow a few times before leaning up and gingerly placing my soda on the coffee table. I can feel Marco staring at me.

“What.”

“Did you take anything from the church? Any idols?”

My eyes flick over to Marco, who looks concerned, his shoulders a little tight and his brow furrowed. 

I lick my lips.

“Define ‘ _anything_.’”


	2. If You're Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trust wanes and waxes, questions are discussed, asses are thoroughly kicked, and the past hurts a lot more than I remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i have a tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

I find myself looking for patterns in the priest’s freckles as Levi hollers in my ear.

“He could be a _skinwalker_ —”

“Edict 79,” I mutter, finding a lumpy animal of some sort. “They can’t impersonate men of God.”

“He could be _possessed_ —”

“Demons don’t bother with us anymore, you know that.”

The silence on the other end of the line is still pretty threatening. Marco looks incredibly nervous. I notice he has four freckles in a perfect line across the bridge of his nose.

“He could be haunted.”

I squint at the phone. Levi’s never been this freaked out before, and it’s making me really nervous.

I don’t know much about hellrifts, but I’ll tell you this: they’re A-grade, jumbo disasters waiting to happen. The last time one opened up was apparently the Spanish Inquisition. That was about the time the Big Dogs upstairs laid down a set of ground rules, a picky little book of edicts. Hellspawn can’t pretend they come from upstairs, or Really Bad Things happen to them. I don’t know what that means either, but if it’s bad enough that ghouls obey them, I can only assume it’s something pretty rough.

The last hellrift was also about the last time anyone heard from either of the head honchos. 

Now all we get are low-grade goobers, for better or for worse.

I realize Levi’s been talking at me, and he’s growing agitated.

“Sorry, Levi, sorry, what?”

His responding stream of incredibly creative curses grows farther away, and Erwin clears his throat on the other line.

“Just check him.”

I sigh and hang up the phone, turning to Marco with what I hope is a disarming smile.

“What was that?”

I choose not to respond to that quite yet. Instead, I stuff my hand between us, into the depths of the couch, and feel around for a moment before pulling out a small, leaky water pistol and shooting him with a brief stream of holy water right between the eyes. He sputters and rubs a hand down his face, but seems otherwise unperturbed. No steam, no screaming, no hellspeak. Grand.

“Hey, um,” he starts, but I interrupt him by standing and taking a few steps backward. He raises his eyebrows. I crook my finger at him, giving him a “come-hither” gesture. His eyebrows shoot up further. I shift my weight, sticking a hip out, and wait.

“Listen,” he says, standing slowly and putting his monstrous soda on the coffee table. “I’m pretty new to all this, so…”

I wait. He sighs and shimmies out from behind the table, crossing the room to stand in front of me.

A moment passes and nothing catches fire, so the haunter-detectors I’d painted on the undersides of the couch cushions are intact. Just one more. I wonder briefly if I’d locked the door behind us as I reach into my boot and pull out a somewhat dull silver knife.

“Oh, um, hey, I think I l-left something at the church, so uh… yeah,” Marco sputters, raising his hands between us in a nervous, defensive gesture. 

“Last one,” I say quietly.

“I r-really think I should be going,” he says shakily, his eyes flicking to the door and back to me. 

I sigh and run a hand through my hair, then hold out my left arm, palm up. “This is all it is,” I say as I press the flat of the blade to my arm. No cutting, not even gentle pressure, just resting the metal against my skin. My eyes on him, I pull the blade away and hold out my hand to him. “Do you trust me?”

It’s a loaded question, and I know it. I really want him to trust me, though. I’m not sure why. It’s just suddenly really important that he lets me do this. I hope the face I’m making conveys that message. I think briefly about yesterday, about how I’m approaching him with the same caution that I’d approached a screaming, telekinetic little girl.

Afraid, I think, and I smile at him, just a little. That’s all they are. Scared and lonely, and Marco slides his hand into mine, shaking hard but still trusting me with this.

I close my fingers over his, slowly raising his arm a little, wrist down, and move the blade to press against his skin. He flinches, and I look up at him. He’s got tears in his eyes. I feel really bad, but precautions are precautions. I learned not to skip the steps a while ago.

I pull the blade away again and reach behind me to place it on my counter. Squeezing his fingers a little, I let go of his hand and raise mine. He looks at me before he squeezes his eyes shut and holds his wrist to his heart. I take a step back and lean against the counter, my hands coming up to lace on top of my head.

The air between us is tense and heavy, and I find myself missing the easy, comfortable way we’d talked just a little while ago. I don’t move, though; I just lean there, body language open to him, and wait for him to make the first move. Calling Erwin can wait.

His eyes are still shut, and he’s chewing on his lower lip nervously, knees tucked together, looking so small in my tiny apartment as he collects himself. I know it’s insane. I know all of this is insane. I kind of want to laugh to myself as I think about it. Innocent little man of God, Marco Bodt, faithful to a fault to a supernatural being and finding out for the first time that the supernatural actually exists. And then there I was, Jean Kirschtein, rescuing him from a fat goblin with half a Snickers and all the grace of a bull in a china shop.

I guess believing in unicorns is different from staring one down as it aims its needle-sharp horn at you and charges.

This must really be a strange day for Marco.

I don’t blame him when he exhales slowly, tremulously. I just literally turned his entire world on its head, dragged him away from his safe place, and then pulled a knife on him.

I haven’t felt this bad in a long time.

I lick my lips. “I’m sorry, Marco,” I say quietly, and he jumps a little. I really wish I had a silver spoon or something instead. Watching Marco quake in fear, startling at my every motion is killing me.

He opens his watery eyes and squeezes his wrist, then clasps his hands together. I wonder if he’s about to pray, and for a second he looks like he’s considering it, but his twined fingers drop in front of him and he swallows nervously.

“I really am,” I continue. My hands are starting to go numb, but they’re linked on top of my head, and I feel like he might be more comfortable that way. 

I read something about body language once, when I was in college. Apparently, something about leaving your stomach unblocked makes people relax. For me, it just symbolizes leaving my innards free for the taking. It makes me a little nervous.

He finally shakes his head and makes eye contact with me. “Just…” He pauses and licks his lips. I blink slowly, but I don’t look away. He shakes his head once more. He looks pale again, just like he had right after we’d ducked out of the crypt, and guilt stabs me in the gut once again. 

A few more minutes pass, and then my phone rings again, and Marco honest to god yelps and clutches his chest. I make a note to turn it on silent as I curse softly and move back to the coffee table. 

“Hi,” I say as I pick it up. My back is to Marco, and I’m hyper-aware of the knife on the counter behind us. I stay as I am, telling him without words that I trust him too.

“What’s taking you?” Levi again, growling a little. I sigh and run a hand through my hair.

“Sorry,” I mumble. “It’s been a while. He’s clear.”

A long, world-weary sigh. I hear the click of a lighter in the background. “Keep an eye on him,” Levi says after he lights his cigarette. He hangs up, and I don’t have to ask to know what he means.

With a whuff, I drop back onto my couch and rub my eyes. “Hey, come back over here, okay?”

Marco pauses, crossing his arms tightly. I don’t want him to feel like he’s being held hostage, so I look at him again and smile. I think he knows it’s just a little fake. He comes over anyway, walking carefully around the coffee table before sinking stiffly into the couch.

I bite my lip and study him for a moment, then reach under the couch for a lumpy clay ashtray I know is there somewhere. I light a cigarette and turn to him, crossing my legs on the lumpy cushion.

“I really am sorry,” I say after a while. I feel like a broken record. “I know shit got heavy really fast.”

He watches me cautiously, then nods and relaxes just a little.

“I pulled you out of something pretty bad. I think you know that, too.” I stop to take a drag off my cigarette. “I can’t really let you go back to the church.”

Marco sighs and slumps, wringing his hands again. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“You can stay here,” I say, flicking my cigarette over the ashtray. I point to my messy bed, just a foot or so behind him. “That’s you. I’ll sleep here.”

He’s already shaking his head, making a polite gesture. “I couldn’t inconvenience you,” he starts, but I just wave my cigarette around in a mildly dismissing gesture. 

“You’d be inconveniencing me if you stayed anywhere else,” I say as I stuff my cigarette between my lips and pull out my phone. “If you’re nearby, I don’t have to go out of my way to keep an eye on you.”

He tilts his head again. I notice with no small amount of relief that the color is returning to his spotted cheeks. “I… am I in trouble?”

I exhale a good amount of smoke and lean further into the couch, crossing my arms. “Not with me.”

A pause. “Then why…?”

How should I put this? I lean over to ash my cigarette again and lick my lips. “You see them now.”

He blinks. I look at him.

“That means they see you too. More than before.”

He swallows. Then something occurs to me. His embarrassed face comes to mind, his crooked smile as he fed me some line about cars’ shadows. 

Even that’s more observant than your average bear.

I squint at him, and he stares right back, and I wonder how bad his vision really is.

“Say, Marco, do you have spare glasses anywhere?”

“O-oh,” he mumbles, rubbing a finger under his nose. “Those are just reading glasses. For when I’m reading during service.”

I nod. Interesting.

“Listen, you’re welcome to stay here,” I say, changing the subject. He’s already opening his mouth, but I continue over him. “I’d really feel better if you stayed here.”

He sighs, but nods. “Can I at least take the couch?”

I hop off the couch, grabbing my soda, and cross into my kitchen. The power still hasn’t come back, but the stormy light coming through the window is still bright enough to fill the room. “We’ll switch, every other,” I say, chugging half of my Coke in one go. “Whoever gets the couch gets to shower in the morning.”

He’s standing, and he crosses into the kitchen to lean against the counter. I start washing the one pot and fork in the sink. “Shower?”

I grin. “Not enough hot water in the whole block for two people to shower every day. Or even one. Hope you’re used to being a little grungy.”

Marco chuckles despite himself and crosses his arms. “I’ll live.”

I whistle casually as I rinse out the pot, then fill it with water again. I drop it on the stove, turn on the gas, and light it with a match, pulling my fingers away from the heat quickly.

It’s as I’m stirring half-cooked pasta with my one fork that I realize just how much of a bachelor I actually am. No wonder girls never come over. I dig through my drawers until I manage to find an ancient pair of disposable chopsticks lodged under the long-disused aluminum foil. 

To be completely honest, I kind of live off take-out. I know, I know.

I drain the pasta with the broken half-lid from another pot (where the other half is, I have no idea; it kind of got busted during a hornworm infestation a few years ago) and dump the jiggly cheese sauce onto the pasta. As I stir it, it makes a gross squishing sound, and I grin at Marco. “Hope you’re hungry,” I say, moving back onto the couch. 

We share the macaroni right out of the pot, and I can see Marco’s amusement at my expense as I try my best to eat with the splintery chopsticks. (I gave him the fork. I’m nothing if not hospitable.)

A few hours pass, and I try to keep the conversation light. I don’t really want to talk to him yet about just what’s going down at his home base; I kind of just want to let it alone. Instead, I tell him about what I do outside of exterminating, and he seems genuinely curious. In turn, he tells me about his church, about how he’d been sent to try and revitalize the community, and how it seems to be working. 

It’s starting to get dark when my phone rings again, thankfully only buzzing against my thigh. I think Marco’s getting a little tired of max-volume digitized ringing erupting from his belly. 

“Jean!” Connie yells in my ear. I pull the phone away for a second, then press it back to my ear. “I need you to come over, dude, this is really really important.”

“I’ve got company, dude,” I sigh, running my hand through my hair. “What’s up?”

“No, this is way too important to be a phone conversation. Tuck it back in your pants and bring her over too.” 

My eyes narrow a little. Connie sounds excited, not panicked, so those red flags are resting easy. I pull the phone away again and turn to Marco. “My idiot friend wants me to come over.”

Marco smiles. “Um, I can probably amuse myself here… you have books, right?”

I stare at him. “You’re invited too.”

“Oh!” He really does look surprised. This guy, I swear. He’s got a million emotions and I can see all of them. “Oh, okay.”

“Give us half an hour,” I mumble, and Connie makes a series of excited, nervous, and generally loud noises. He’d better not have blown up his kitchen again.

As I’m pulling another hoodie out of a dark closet, I look back at Marco, who’s pulling my hoodie down and looking at the coffee table. The hoodie’s a little long on him, and the sleeves cover his hands a little, even though he’s taller than me. I guess he’s all legs. I slide my arm into one of the sleeves of the worn sweater I’m pulling on. “You can keep that one,” I say, and he looks up at me. His hand fiddles with the zipper.

“Just until I can buy a new one,” he says. He smiles widely then, and I notice that he’s got little laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. “I guess all my clothes are forfeit too, huh.”

I close and lock my apartment door behind us and skip down the old, creaky stairs. “Honestly, they probably got eaten by now, if your vestment is any indication.”

There’s a bus a block over that takes us directly to the nicer part of West Trost, kind of near the historic part of the city we’re famous for. All the buildings in that ancient crap heap have these bright red roofs, and if the shit living in them is any indication the whole place should just be condemned. Burned. Buried under sixty feet of concrete. The rest of Trost sprang up around it over time, though. Bad soil grows bad crops, if you ask me.

I look out the window of the bus, slumped down in the two-seat bench I’m sharing with Marco. My legs are spread wide, taking up most of my allotted space and about half of Marco’s, but he doesn’t complain. “Hey,” I say after a while, keeping an eye out for our stop. 

“Hmm?”

“Don’t tell Connie about, uh…” I run a hand through my hair. Thunder cracks outside, and what had been a light rain when we left starts coming down a little harder. “How we met.”

There’s a silence, and I glance over to him. He looks a little confused, but nods.

“Like, you can tell him about your job or whatever, but anything… weird, just keep it on the down-low.”

A light seems to go off behind his eyes. “He doesn’t know.”

“Right.”

“Oh.”

‘Oh’ is right. Welcome to my life.

“Also, he thinks I work for the police department, so.”

Marco smiles. “So you’re Officer Kirschtein?”

I laugh shortly. “Nah, I’m the night autopsy guy to them. So sorry in advance for all the talk about organs you’re going to hear. I think Connie asks me about work so he doesn’t have to pay to see slasher flicks at the movies.”

Marco laughs, and it’s a soft, pleasant sound. I smile wider. It seems like he might be getting over the whole… knife thing earlier. 

I still have this sneaking suspicion that he thinks he’s being held captive, though.

We hop off the bus and I lead the way to Connie’s through the warm rain, jogging around puddles and tugging my hood farther over my head. He seems to have been expecting us, though, because I’m graced with his huge grin midway through the second knock on his door. 

Pulling my hood down, I wipe my shoes off on his carpet and move directly into his kitchen. It’s an old habit between us; the cursory fridge checks are less a search for food and more an indirect way of checking on each other’s mental health. That’s why he hasn’t been over lately, though not for lack of trying. I just don’t want him to see my fridge, full of condiments and spoiled milk and take-out remnants. He might have me committed.

I check over his fresh produce and healthy beer stash and—god, is that _smoothie mix?_ Jesus Christ.

I roll back into the living room and Connie’s already all over Marco, introducing himself excitedly and asking a million questions. I bring a fist down lightly on his shaved head. “Let him breathe,” I laugh as I pull off my hoodie and toss it over his banister to dry. “So what’s so important that I had to get water in my shoes to hear?”

Connie ushers us into his living room and sits us down, standing in front of the couch. He’s almost dancing from foot to foot, and if he grins any wider I’m really afraid his face might crack in half.

“So I did something really important today,” he begins, his words tumbling out in a jumble. 

“Oh yeah?”

I slouch on the couch, hands in my pockets, and Marco leans forward onto his knees. He’s actually paying attention, bless his heart.

“I bought a thing.”

I’m paying attention now, too. I sit up straight and stare right at my friend.

Connie grins for a second longer, then reverently pulls a little velvet box out of his pocket. 

“Holy shit,” I breathe, and I’m genuinely feeling something like giddiness filling my chest. “I thought you were gonna ask her to share your apartment, not your stupid last name.”

Connie isn’t even fazed. “At least people pronounce mine right,” he says, and he moves forward to sit on the floor in front of us. He opens the box and shows us his acquisition. It’s simple, but pretty, and I know already Sasha’s going to like it. The diamond is small enough that she won’t be able to kill anyone with it. “I’m gonna ask her.”

I look from the ring, glinting in the warm light of Connie’s living room, to my friend. “When?”

“Tomorrow night. We’re going out for dinner.”

Marco’s smiling widely, despite having never met either of them before. I lean onto my knees, crossing my arms a little. “Shit, man. Good luck.” I kind of wonder what that’s like. Connie and Sasha have been together forever. Since high school, actually. They grew up together, fell in love, graduated at each other’s side through grad school, and now Connie’s gonna pop the big one.

I can’t even keep a chick for more than two weeks without her getting suspicious. I guess that’s what happens when most of your life is either a big secret or a big lie.

I listen to Connie ramble about his plan for a while, listening to him list off all his backup plans for when Sasha inevitably injects her usual brand of chaos into their date. I look over at Marco for a moment, and he’s freaking eating it up. He’s not wearing a ring on his left hand, but honestly, I’d kind of figured he wasn’t married. Something about how he nearly died alone in a crypt gives me that impression.

It occurs to me that Marco appears to be a resiliently bubbly person.

I feel a twinge of guilt again.

“You know,” Marco says, leaning toward Connie. “I’m ordained and all.”

“No shit, really?” Connie pushes the ring box carefully into his pocket and laces his fingers in his lap. “Internet ordained or for real ordained?”

Marco laughs. “I’m a priest, actually. So for real ordained.”

“Aw, what? I’ve been over here cussing up a storm!”

“It’s okay, I won’t tell the Big Guy.” 

I laugh at that, though I’m not really sure why. Something about hearing Marco use the same words for his god as I do makes me laugh. He shoots me a smile. 

My phone rings again in my pocket; I’m really popular tonight, apparently. It’s Levi, though, so it’s the kind of popularity I’m not really sure I want. I excuse myself to the kitchen and answer my phone.

“Hi.”

“Bring him over.”

“What?”

Levi clicks his tongue, clearly irritated. “Come around close. Don’t be late or we’ll lock you out.”

My phone beeps in my ear. I check the time; it’s still early, around seven, but something tells me I should just suck up my pride and buy some damn dishes. I can’t make Marco eat out of a pot for the entire duration of his stay or he’ll just run away on principle.

Marco and Connie are talking in the living room still. I lean against the kitchen doorway and stuff my hands in my pockets. 

“So wait, you have your own church?”

“No,” Marco says, laughing. “Well, kind of. I’m just running it for now. They’ll decide in the spring if they want to keep me or not.”

“You think they will?”

“I really hope so.” A soft smile spreads over Marco’s face, and he laces his fingers together, still leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I really like the people that come.”

I scoot back into the kitchen and open Connie’s fridge again. “Hey, Marco,” I call over my shoulder. “Do you drink?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” he calls in response, and I make an affirming sound.

“I do!” 

“Duh, Connie.”

I grab two cans of beer and a bottle of water from the fridge, then move out to reclaim my seat in the living room. Connie and I open our beers, and Marco accepts the bottle of water gratefully. Relaxing here for a while couldn’t hurt. 

“So,” Connie says, grinning at me. I feel nervous suddenly. “We got a new RA at the clinic.” I groan loudly. Marco looks a little confused, but he doesn’t ask.

“Research assistant,” I supply. “They’re undergraduate gophers that Connie uses as errand slaves.”

“Untrue,” Connie says, overriding me purely in volume. “This one actually does stuff.” He looks at me again. “She’s really nice, but kind of a space cadet. Dark hair, nice face, totally your type.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s probably, like, nineteen, dude.”

Really, it’s because I’m not quite ready to have another girl yelling at me or blowing up my phone because I stood her up, especially not when I can’t tell her the honest reason. I’m a little sick of lying to people who just want to get closer. Also, surprisingly, girls tend not to fall for the “they found a huge pile of corpses behind Cost-Co and there’s no one around to dice them except me” excuse.

“Besides,” I say, attempting to cut Connie off. “I’m teaching two other labs on top of gross anatomy this semester.”

“Aw, what? I thought after this whole morgue thing you’d stop overworking yourself,” Connie whines, leaning back on his hands. He really needs to get another chair or something.

I shrug. “I could use the cash, and pretty much half of the lab teachers are this graduating cohort. None of them want to teach in their last semester.”

“Wait, where are the labs?”

“University’s bio department,” I reply, finishing my beer and crushing the can. 

“Aw, you’re teaching little freshmen?”

I roll my eyes. “Please don’t remind me.” Marco chuckles, his gaze moving between us, and I knock my knee against his. “What are you giggling about, Padre?”

He doesn’t correct me. “I can’t really imagine you teaching.”

Arching my eyebrow, I snort a little. _‘That’s probably because you’ve only received the weirdest view of my life so far,’_ I don’t say. 

“Jobs for people with half-finished biology doctorates are kind of slim right now,” I say instead, and that’s the truth. Honestly, I’d rather be doing research, but juggling grad school and a widening fault sounds pretty awful. 

Also, you can only really quit one of those two things. So I did.

I stand and take Connie’s empty beer, moving back into the kitchen to drop them into the recycling. I hear them start up a conversation again. Marco asks Connie the worst possible question (“So what does your clinic do?”) and I know Connie’s going to talk at him without stopping to breathe until one of them passes out. Despite seeming like a total airhead, the guy’s at least partially brilliant. He was in the top ten in our graduating undergrad class, after all.

Under me. Of course. 

I glance out into the living room, watching Connie gesticulate wildly as he tries to explain the concept of evolutionary psychology and anxiety to the poor priest. Marco nods, but he’s sitting up now and looking like he’s mildly regretting the question. Connie never was great at explaining his work. Even the people he works with have trouble following him at times. It’s kind of a miracle his dissertation defense went off so well.

Peeking at them again, I sidle casually toward Connie’s cabinets. I figure I have another minute or so before he starts hollering at me to decode his train of thought. I open his cabinets quietly and take quick stock of what a real adult’s collection of dishes look like. That’s a really sad thought. Connie Springer: Adult; Jean Kirschtein: owns a single fork because the collective of Junjudee in the basement stole every other piece of silverware.

“Jean!”

“What?” I reply hastily, closing the cabinet again and trying not to sound suspicious. Connie has _two_ different sizes of plates, and I can’t really figure out why for the life of me.

“What does exposure therapy strengthen again?”

I sigh and move back into the living room, standing next to Connie with my hands in my pockets. He tends to stand when he’s excited, as evidenced by the state we’d found him in upon arriving. “Really, dude? Inhibitory synapses in the amygdala.”

He pauses. “That makes sense, I guess.”

“Duh.”

I look at Marco, and I can’t help but laugh really hard at the slightly overwhelmed look on his face. Really, he seems smart enough, and he’s well-adjusted, but getting blasted in the face with enthusiastic experimental psychology is stressful for the people who do it for a living, let alone people who just wandered into a psychologist’s house.

“Okay, I think I’m going to rescue Marco,” I manage, turning to shake Connie’s hand. He shakes gladly, the grin sliding over his face again.

“Thanks for making it down, man. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Please do.” I turn and grab my somewhat dry hoodie from the banister, pulling it back on. It’s only a little chilly. Marco’s shaking hands with Connie as well, thanking him honestly for having us. Even if it meant learning a whole lot of new words in not a whole lot of time.

I pull Connie’s door shut behind us, noting happily that the rain seems to have let up. I trace my usual ward over his lock in the rain water still dripping down the door, then start down the street toward the bus.

“Not so bad, right?” I turn to Marco as I pull my hood up, giving him a half-grin.

He chuckles, pulling his hood up as well, and falls into step next to me. “Remind me not to ask that question anymore.”

“Yeah, he’s a little… enthusiastic.”

“I noticed. Are we heading back to your apartment?”

“Nah, need to make a pit stop first.” I dig out my cigarettes and light one, cupping my hand over it to keep it from getting too wet. “This guy I know wants to talk to you, probably about what happened.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Oh. What should I say?”

I laugh shortly. “Answer his questions completely honestly. Trust me, you do not want to lie to this guy.”

Marco, surprisingly, breathes a sigh of relief. “Good. I’m a terrible liar. When Connie asked how we met, I told him we met at a pizza shop.”

“How’d he take that?”

“I don’t think he believed me,” Marco sighs, brushing his damp bangs aside a little. “He said that he’s, what was it… ‘genuinely shocked that Jean Kirschtein would willingly talk to anyone with a pulse.’”

Sounds about right. 

I’m about to comment on that, but a ruckus from an alley we’re about to pass takes precedence. I throw my arm in front of Marco’s chest, stopping him in his tracks. Moving quickly, my arm still in front of him, I press against the building next to us, maneuvering Marco until he’s standing next to me.

I wait a moment, tossing my cigarette into the street, before I chance a peek into the alley.

It’s just a ghoul, digging around in the trash and making a racket. I breathe a sigh of relief, looking over at Marco.

“We’ll just loop back around the block,” I say quietly, starting back the way we came. He reaches out and touches my elbow, though, and I look back at him.

“Is it… dangerous?”

“Not particularly.” I run my hand through my wet bangs. “Just annoying.”

He pauses to chew on his lips, studying me. “So… it won’t hurt anyone?”

I look at him again. He’s full of surprises. Not wanting to lie, I say, “Well, I mean… if they walk past it, maybe.”

His eyebrows shoot up further. “Shouldn’t… um…”

Seriously? Oh god.

I just got the trash smell out of these jeans from the last one. “You take this whole ‘do unto others’ things very seriously, don’t you?”

His gaze falls to the wet ground between us, and he looks very pensive for a moment. I’m just about to punch his arm and tell him I’m joking when he looks back at me with a shaky smile. “Yes.”

“Oh.”

“What do we do?”

 _We._ It occurs to me that not once in this whole mess (meaning the last twelve hours) has Marco tried to throw me into a fight on my own. Not once has he referred to us as anything less than a team.

I am going to buy the best fucking plates there are. At Target.

“These things are assholes,” I mumble, peeking around the edge of the building. I can see one of the big industrial dumpsters rattling a little, the lid popping up every now and again. Gross. “We just need to haul it out of its little garbage castle and kill it.”

“Kill it?”

I look at him. “Yeah. Send it back where it came from.” He doesn’t look too excited. “Take away its corporeal form, it has no choice but to head back downstairs.”

“Ah.”

I try to give him an out. “You just stay here, I’ll—”

“I want to help!”

Of course not. I’m both extremely flattered and very worried. It’s my first thought to use him as bait, but the idea of throwing him into a dumpster with a probably very hungry ghoul just after he’s started making sustained eye contact again makes me a little sick. 

I sigh and run my fingers through my hair. May as well give him a choice. “Do you want to be the bait or the stabber?”

He pales. “I-I have to stab him?”

“It. Yeah.”

“… Bait, please.”

This guy. Human of the year. He’s either very brave or very stupid.

“Okay. You see that dumpster, the blue one?”

He pokes his head around the corner and startles a little when it jolts away from the wall and coughs up some torn up cardboard boxes. Turning back to me, he nods his head, tight-lipped.

“All I need you to do is walk up to it and bang on it a little. Then run behind me. Okay?”

He nods again, but I really need to make sure. 

“Marco.”

“Y-yeah?”

I put my hands on his shoulders firmly. “I’ve got your back.” I look into his wide, dark eyes, finding only a little uncertainty. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” Swallowing and hoping he didn’t notice, I let out a sigh and say the words I swore I’d never say to anyone. “I promise.”

He blinks, looking from my eyes to my chest and back again, then smiles bravely. “I’ll hold you to it.”

And with that he’s sliding out of my grasp and walking toward the dumpster. I pull my hoodie and my shirt up over the bowie knife stuffed into the back of my pants, getting it ready. Marco walks right up to the rattling trash heap and glances back at me. In response, I give him a thumbs up with one hand and pull my hood over my head more securely with the other. He nods.

Almost politely, Marco raises his hand and knocks loudly on the wet metal. The dumpster jumps and slides toward him, and he turns and bolts back toward me. That’s when I notice the nervousness in his eyes. He’s behind me quickly, though, and I assume my position, fingers of my left hand curling around the leather handle of my knife.

The thing that vaults out of the dumpster smells about as good as one might expect, and it stands in the alley, white eyes flicking from me to the guy standing a foot behind me.

It opens its mouth, but I’m not about to give it the chance to speak. As gross and weird as these things are, they’re dangerous with words. I lunge toward it and hit it right across the temple with a good right hook, knocking its thin body back against the dumpster. My knife is out before it hits the ground. I toss the blade to my right hand and jump toward the thing, one boot pinning its arm, the other across its throat. 

I really want to say something cool before I give the thing a third eye socket, but it’s gurgling out laughter around my boot. That’s legitimately surprising. If they talk at this point, it’s usually high-pitched bargaining. I move my foot from its neck to its chest and press hard. “What’s so funny?”

The thing laughs harder, its voice raspy either from disuse or a busted throat. Its free arm comes up to grab at my pants, leaving a smear of please _god_ be mud and not trash juice. 

I grind my heel into its chest. Its clammy white skin is already blooming a dark greenish bruise under my boots. 

“What?” I snarl the question again, getting really fed up with its shit. 

Turns out, sixteen years of this crap hasn’t taught me to ease up on the pride yet.

Marco yelps behind me, and in the brief distraction of me turning to check on him, the ghoul under me kicks its legs up and straight into my balls.

‘Fucking excruciating’ would be putting my current state of torment lightly. My breath ejects from my lungs and I drop like a sack of potatoes. The ghoul rolls with me, holding its filthy hand across my throat and preventing me from drawing new breath. I can hear Marco struggling with what must be this thing’s mate, and based on the loud banging sounds coming from the neighboring dumpster, someone’s winning rather spectacularly.

I wonder where my knife went. I also wonder if my testicles will ever come back out of my body. 

Struggling to breathe, I glare up at the ghoul, who grins right back at me. Its pointed teeth are green and rotten, its breath foul, but I’ll be damned if I let this thing get the better of me. I liberate one hand from my aching junk and start slapping around for my knife, but the ghoul just grabs my exposed forearm and digs its nails into my skin.

“Stupid, stupid,” it mutters, milky eyes roving over my face. “I’m going to eat you.”

So matter-of-fact. Grunting and wriggling, I try to throw it off balance, but it’s not going great.

“Did you know?” I look at it. It’s playing with its food much more than usual. Maybe it’s the roaring in my ears that comes with strangulation, but I can’t hear Marco anymore. Hopefully he died more quickly than this, I think frantically. “They see you.”

I cough out something resembling “fuck off, you hagmeat.”

“They’re watching,” it says, and I swear I can see it shuddering with glee. It cuts to the chase then and opens its mouth wide, so wide. The skin at the corners of its mouth cracks and splits, and its jaw drops and drops to reveal rows of mossy, dark teeth, all sharp and lined up and perfect for tearing off handsome faces like mine. 

There’s also something coming at me that I haven’t seen before. It must be its tongue, I think, and I’m horrified by the idea that it might cover me in green saliva before it devours me messily. Until I realize that under thick layers of black, oozy blood, the thing is shiny and sharp.

Oh. I found my knife.

The fingers around my neck twitch and relax, and before it collapses on me, I throw it to the side and cough. I’m not sure which is worse; the pounding in my head or the pounding in my balls.

I look back up and see Marco, whose face is absolutely covered in putrid black awfulness and an extremely disturbed expression. He wobbles up next to me and falls to his knees, reaching over to touch my shoulder gently. That’s about the point where he turns and pukes, curling in on himself and his horror. I reach over with my free hand and rub his back, choking out dumb things like “it’s okay” and “you did good” and “oh god ow why.”

The insanely bright light that had illuminated this whole scene flickers then, and I’m really upset that this whole thing isn’t over. ‘Do unto others’ be damned, I’m not sending any spirits home in this condition. The light flickers, dims, and flickers again, then is obscured by a figure.

Suddenly, I feel very very anxious. Much more so than when it had been us versus man-eating ghouls.

My hand fisting in Marco’s hoodie, I look up at the figure crouched on another dumpster. It’s wide and menacing, but I can’t make out anything aside from its silhouette thanks to the damn bright light.

Panic is rising in my chest. We need to leave.

“Marco,” I gasp, eyes not leaving the figure, and he thankfully gets the picture. He hauls me to my feet, both of us swaying a little. It’s enough, though. Grabbing his sleeve and letting go of my crotch, I turn and we run, leaving the figure behind us.

I feel its eyes boring into the back of my head. It doesn’t matter. We run. 

We run until our legs are burning and we’re standing in the bright light of Target’s main doors, and I finally let him rest. Our breath wheezing, I shakily light a cigarette. Marco leans heavily against one of those big stupid red ball statues they always have outside the store.

“I can’t believe… what…?”

I look over at him from where I’ve collapsed against another big red ball. I remember that this is probably the first time Marco has ever killed anything bigger than a house spider, if that, and he’s the one that just saved my sorry ass.

“Marco,” I mumble, exhaling smoke and wiping a hand across my forehead. “Thank you.”

He looks down at me and stands straight. His hands move to fidget in front of him. 

“You saved my life,” I continue, inhaling deeply again and not looking away from him. “I owe you.”

With a deep sigh, he shakes his head and smiles wanly. “You don’t. I think… I’d be in a lot of trouble without you.” I blink up at him and he scratches the back of his head. “I sure don’t know what I’m doing. I doubt I’d be able to summon up the courage to fight these things without you.”

Oh.

I stand, flicking my cigarette into a puddle. “You’re doing just fine, Marco.” I smile at him, feeling a little warm and fuzzy despite my many current grievances. “Give yourself a little credit.”

Not giving him a chance to respond, I turn and walk into the store. He jogs in behind me and catches up, raising his eyebrows when I grab a cart. Leaning against it eases the ache in my gut a little, but I’m not quite sure I’m ready to admit the assault on my goods just yet.

“Holy shit, you smell like the family bathroom,” comes a familiar deadpan from behind us. I look over my shoulder and sure enough, there’s the world’s crabbiest psychic, his arms crossed and a sour look on his face. “What the hell kind of game are you playing, Kirschtein?”

“Sorry for the mess,” I mumble, turning to face Levi. “Had a little… issue on the way here.”

Marco’s already apologizing, either to me or Levi or whoever is within smelling distance. Levi cuts him off. “You,” he says with an accusatory point at Marco. “Follow me.”

The priest looks at me a little helplessly, but I just smile and give him a little push. “Try not to get trash juice on the seat,” I call after him, and he gives me another worried look as he trots after Levi.

I’m on my own again then, so I lean heavily on the cart and start maneuvering the familiar aisles. I used to work here too, but to be honest, it sucked ass. I quit not because of the fault, but just because I was tired of getting into fights with fucking idiot customers. I’m not cut out for retail. That’s why I’m thankful for the few paying jobs Erwin can rustle up for me.

I turn down the housewares aisle and nearly bowl over a short little dude stocking the overly fancy glass vases. He gives me an affronted look, nose wrinkling, until he notices that I’m me. 

“Hey, Armin,” I say, smiling at him a little.

“You look awful,” is his oh-so-charming response.

“Yeah,” I mumble, running my relatively more clean hand through my hair and looking at the floor. I can’t really make eye contact with him without remembering how bright his blue eyes look when they’re red and rimmed with tears.

A quick note: I broke this kid in half when I was still young and stupid, and I’m not sure he ever truly got over it. I couldn’t risk it anymore, though, not after what happened to him. Because of me.

My chest is tight.

“Jean,” he says, and I look back up at him, trying to school my face into a casual mask. Four years and I can’t get over this shit either, apparently. He sighs at me and ties his long blonde hair into a ponytail. “Stop thinking,” he continues, and I let out a shaky exhale.

Okay, maybe fighting with customers isn’t the only reason I quit working here.

“How’ve you been?” I ask, drumming my fingers against the cart.

He smiles slightly. I try to think about what day it is, but it’s been cloudy for two straight weeks. “Okay,” he responds. He reaches down and grabs an empty box to break down, probably just to do something with his hands. God, this is awkward. “You?”

“Oh, you know,” I say, giving a feeble attempt at joviality. “Shitty.” The honest truth, mostly.

“I see.”

The silence between us is killer. The guilt growing in my chest is hot, and I can feel my cheeks flushing.

He throws the box into his half-full garbage cart and huffs exasperatedly. “I told you to stop thinking, Jean. Come on, it’s been four years.” He gives me a legitimately admirable smile, and I suddenly remember why I liked him so much. He may look like a feeble twink, but this kid is probably one of the more courageous people I’ve ever met. But when he freaks, he freaks out _hard._ “I can handle myself by now.”

I still feel like I should say sorry. My mouth opens, but he’s already holding up a hand. He moves to the side of my cart and rests a hand on one of mine. 

“Don’t.”

I lean down, pressing my forehead to his hand. My face is probably incredibly sweaty and nasty, but he doesn’t flinch away. His other hand comes up to rest on the back of my head, his short nails scratching through the darker hair there. “You need a haircut.”

“Oh yeah?”

“… And a shower. You seriously look terrible, Jean. Were you dumpster diving?”

I tilt my head to give him a dirty look. “More like the dumpster was diving me.”

He smiles. My chest hurts. 

“Have you told Eren yet?”

He sighs, scratching the back of my head again. “No. He knows something is up, but he hasn’t quite pieced it together. I can’t blame him… he doesn’t even know anything like that is real.”

“Mm.”

I close my eyes and enjoy the petting, while I can get it. Armin and I don’t see each other often, but when we do, the closeness we’d gotten lost in before the shit hit the fan seeps into our bones. 

But we can’t love each other, not like that. It still hurts too much.

I open my eyes before the images of Armin, bloody and feral, locked in an ancient jail cell in historical Old Trost have a chance to flood my mind again.

Yeah, I fucked that one up big time. I’m probably the only person in history who’s taken someone on a date to a tourist attraction and ended up giving them the souvenir of being a fucking werewolf.

Oh yeah, those are real too. And beautiful, genius, brave little Armin is one of them now. Because of me.

I think I found the real reason I can’t keep girls. And not just because of the liking-dudes-too thing.

I straighten up and press a soft kiss to his forehead. He winces a little, and I’m really hoping that it’s because of the way I smell. 

“I need plates,” I manage finally, opening my eyes and looking down at him. He laughs, and the sound is honest and sweet. “Are you seeing someone?” The question comes out before I can stop it. God dammit, mouth-filter. I feel my face turn red. “Not because I’m trying to… you know…”

“I know, Jean, god. Chill out.” He smiles a little and tilts his head at me. “Yeah, I am.”

“Is it going good?”

“You tell me.” He steps back and spreads his arms, and I notice that yeah, it looks like it’s going pretty good. He looks healthy, despite the whole furry-Friday deal he has going on every month. Usually werewolves are gaunt, stressed, unhealthy, prematurely grey. 

“Anyone I know?”

He taps a finger to his chin and grins widely. “Ten years ago, you’d be so mad,” he says, and my jaw drops.

“Seriously? You’re dating _Mikasa_?”

He bites his lip and nods, and the sly bastard’s just barely holding back a huge grin. 

“You dog. How long?”

“About a year and a half now.”

“Does she know?”

His eyes soften and he nods. “She found me a great place to, you know… be alone for a while. She locks me in a basement in Old Trost and camps in a tent outside until I’ve calmed down.”

“Sounds about right,” I muse, thinking about how Mikasa used to be a complete mother hen in high school. She’s an interesting chick. Apparently Eren’s dad picked her up out of a Japanese alley on a business trip and adopted her right into the family, so she’s been paying it forward ever since. 

She completely rejected every part of me through all of high school, though, which put a big damper on my confidence after a while. Not like I can blame her now; I was a huge turd in high school. More so than I am now, surprisingly.

Armin blinks and leans into the earpiece stuffed into his ear, then laughs quietly. I raise my eyebrows in question. He covers his mouth and looks up at me. “Levi wants to know where the ‘smelly shitty hobo’ went.”

Ah, good old night shifts at Target. I roll my eyes and grab Armin’s radio off his hip, pressing the talk button. “Gimme a bit, jeez. I’m a paying customer.” I hand the thing back to him, and he smiles fondly. I can’t help but return it. He pushes me down the aisle toward the plates, and I wave over my shoulder, knowing our time is up.

Picking out plates is hard. I just kind of grab a big, plastic-wrapped stack of offensively green plastic plates and toss it in my cart. The matching bowls and a box of cheap silverware make their way in there as well, and I’m debating buying cups too when Marco pops up out of nowhere and scares the shit out of me.

“Jesus, Marco,” I manage, looking magnificently guilty over my pathetic cartful of shit any 26-year-old in his right mind should already own. He blinks at me and smiles, dumping the few items in his arms into the cart too. Underwear, socks, a pack of t-shirts—the necessities.

He’s managed to wash the ghoul blood off of his face, I notice with relief. We both still smell like shit.

“What’d Levi want?”

He shrugs, drumming his fingers against the edge of the cart. “He just asked a bunch of questions about what happened.”

I raise my eyebrows, chucking the cups into the cart. “And you answered them honestly, right?”

He laughs and shifts his weight, scratching the back of his head a little nervously. “I tried to lie about my vestment getting eaten and he, ah… threatened me. So yeah, I did.”

“Good. I told you.” I smile and continue down the aisle. I turn back to look at Armin, but he and his garbage cart are gone.

I sigh a little and run a hand through my hair. 

“You okay?” I look up at Marco, who looks legitimately concerned for me. His hair is a mess, and a little damp, probably from washing it out in the sink. “Did you get hurt?”

I laugh a little, remembering the pain curling in my stomach. My poor future children. “I’ll be okay,” I manage, turning the cart toward the front. It’s about closing time anyway, and the few straggling customers in the store are starting to stare at us.

“Is there anything I can do?” He’s walking next to me, scanning me as if looking for an obvious wound. Sorry, buddy, we’re not quite that close. 

“Nope. Time heals all wounds.” I look up at him, leaning a little more on the cart. “Thanks, though.”

He smiles, but if he thinks I can’t still feel him looking at me, he’s crazy.

The only register left is Eren, and I try to reign in my urge to be sassy. I’m in no mood.

“Hey, man,” I say as I pile my crap on his little conveyor belt thing. “How’s it going?”

Eren shrugs, looking a little perturbed. I raise an eyebrow. 

“What’s up your butt?”

He exhales sharply through his nostrils and “accidentally” doesn’t scan anything I give him except the cups. I bite back my pride and let him illegally take care of me.

I hand him a twenty and wait for him to spill the beans, but he doesn’t. He’s never really been one for oversharing, as far as I could tell. 

“Jean,” I hear, a rumbling baritone calling my name. I guess Erwin’s here too, not that I’m surprised. Eren stuffs my change in my hand, and I turn to look at the huge manager, who’s poking his head out of the little side cash office. He gestures toward me to come over.

I turn to Marco again. “Hey, sorry, can you watch the stuff?” He nods, scooting the cart over to the side wall while I cross over to the office and slide inside.

I sink into a free chair across from Erwin. “What’s up?”

He holds his hand out. No shit-shooting here, I guess.

“Listen, uh,” I start, already feeling like an ass. “The priest, he’s staying with me for a while.”

“I know,” Erwin says, crossing his legs. 

“And, uh,” I continue. Why does Erwin’s stare have to be so intense? “I don’t, uh… I don’t really have any money. Because of the whole no job thing.”

He stares at me for a second, then nods. “Keep it, then.”

“Really?”

The look he gives me as he crosses his arms is a gentlemanly sort of ‘ask me again and see what happens’ look, so I drop it.

“Do you have any new jobs for me?”

Erwin pulls out a red folder from under the keyboard and hands it to me. So official; Levi only ever gives me receipt paper, actual receipts, or half-ripped napkins.

“This one’s a few towns over, but it pays.” 

I wince, not opening the folder. Erwin uncrosses his legs and laces his fingers together in his lap. “I, uh, don’t have a car,” I say, speaking quietly and feeling more than a little ashamed. Hi, I’m Jean Kirschtein, and I clearly have no idea what being a grown-up is like.

“I know a guy at the Hertz,” he says, pulling out his wallet. He digs through it for a second, then hands me a basically immaculate business card. The name pressed into it reads ‘Mike Zacharius.’ “Go there tomorrow and let him know I sent you, he’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t have a license.”

He stares at me, ever cool and calm. “You know how to drive, right?”

“Well, yeah.” Of course I do. Kind of.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Oh god.

He nods at me and turns back to his computer, signaling that our conversation is over. I grab the folder and see myself out.

Marco is back at Eren’s register, talking to him earnestly, and Levi is leaning against the counter behind them. He’s holding his keys; must be quitting time.

I walk over to Levi and dig in my pocket, handing him two wrinkled twenties. He gives me a filthy look, but hands one of the bills back, and I know better than to do anything but thank him. Erwin threatens, but Levi _will_ actually change his mind if you give him the chance.

Marco says goodbye to a happier-looking Eren, and I wave too. We grab our bags and head out.

“You making friends again?” I smile at Marco around my cigarette as we wait for the bus to come, each holding a light plastic bag full of life’s necessities. 

Marco smiles back at me, tugging the hoodie sleeves down around his knuckles. “Eren looked sad, so I talked to him a little. He’s pretty nice once you get used to him.”

“Oh yeah?” I blow smoke at the clouds. They’re looking threatening again, but thankfully it’s not raining right now. “I guess he’s okay.”

“Mm.” Marco looks up at the sky too.

We hop on the bus when it comes and return to my apartment. I let him take the half-hot shower while I unwrap the new dishes and put them where I estimate dishes ought to go. After powering through an icy shower of my own, I collapse onto the couch and pull the spare blanket over me. Marco’s already out cold on the bed, and I can’t really blame him. (I’d forced him to take the bed tonight, even if it was like pulling teeth.)

My eyes slowly drift closed as I think about dead ghouls, haunting silhouettes, and gaping hell holes.

That night, the temperature drops sixty degrees into the low teens, and the sky dumps two feet of snow on the city.


	3. Sinking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something's making Marco nervous, and if it kills me, I'll find out what. Famous last words, right?

My phone shrieking at me through the darkness jostles me out of some sort of shivering nightmare. The details of my dream are hazy, and are soon forgotten in my urgency to grab my phone.

I meant to answer the phone, but the first coherent thought I have comes out instead. “Holy fucking shit Christ it’s cold what the fuck,” I mumble into the phone, rolling off my makeshift bed and landing with a thud between the couch and the coffee table. It’s uncomfortably tight down here.

The only thing I hear on the other end of the line for a moment is heavy, strained breathing. I pull the phone away (and rear my head back, smacking it into the coffee table) to look at the caller ID again. “Levi?”

A cough sounds, and it kind of sounds now like whatever sounds he’s making are coming from the inside of a toilet. I pray that he doesn’t drop me in. 

A rustling sound then, and I can hear Eren’s concerned and half-asleep voice in the background, nothing but a quiet mumble at first. “Jean?” His voice is still thick with sleep. “Why’s he calling you?”

Oh, this is awkward. I’m suddenly more awake and frozen than ever. Seriously, I can see my breath in my own goddamn apartment. Really hoping that I’m not stuck down here, I wiggle around in my blanket trap. “I don’t know, he woke me up. What’s happening?”

“He’s… what are you doing?”

Distant comes the rumble of a seriously pissy Levi. I tense up a little out of reflex. I hear more mumbling, then some impressive retching.

“Jesus, you’re covered in sweat… should I—Jean, should I take him to the ER?”

The pieces are kind of falling into place, and suddenly I feel worse than usual. I try to turtle into the thin blanket a little more. “No. Can he talk?”

“Jean, what the fuck is going on.”

“Dude, it’s not my place to tell.” I can hear Marco moving on the bed, and I crane my neck around to try and catch a glimpse of him.

“Fuck you. Tell me what’s happening.”

“… Food poisoning?”

“I swear to—” Eren stops himself there, and I can hear the echoing sound of Levi attempting words again. “He says ‘take the priest with you.’”

I blink. Apparently I’m not actually awake enough for this. My eye itches a little, so I rub at it with a blanket-covered fist and immediately regret it when the scratchy fabric assaults my skin. I’m confused as to what’s happening over on that end that requires a three am panicked phone call, but I know I’m not getting any answers now. “Tell him okay.”

“Jean, please?” I pause. My heart aches for this kid, it does; everyone around him knows and it’s like he’s just barely on the edge of some horrible discovery. The truth, however, is not a punishment I’d wish on anyone. “Jean!” 

I startle, then reach up to rub a cold, bare hand down my face. “Eren, look… just take care of Levi, okay? He’ll tell you when he’s ready.”

A silence. It’s uncomfortable.

“Jean, what’s going on? Levi’s always been a little weird—ow—but it’s been getting worse lately… and then Armin, he’s been hiding something from me for years, and now Mikasa’s in on it too.”

Fuck.

“I’m sorry, Eren,” I say, and I really mean it. “You need to hear it from Levi. It’s… it’s not my story to tell.”

I hang up before he can respond, mostly because I can hear him gathering a monstrous holler. 

Tossing my phone up onto the coffee table, I wriggle around until I can get my knees under me and push up and out of my trap. The floor is like ice. What the fuck is with the weather?

The thing no one tells you about being a psychic is that “visions” or whatever are by no means friendly. They come with headaches and nightmares and, apparently, morning sickness. If Levi rolled out of bed with that instruction shooting out of his mouth, to the point where he had to call me before he was even mildly functional, it must have been something huge.

I haul myself back onto the couch with a ‘whumpf’ and stare out the window by the foot of the bed. Frost curls on the glass. ‘Bring the priest,’ Levi says. ‘Hoarggllhhh,’ Levi says. It’s going to be a while before I get answers, if at all. One thing about Levi, though? Obeying him like a gut instinct will never lead you wrong. At least, not in my experience.

I sigh again and wrap myself more firmly in my blankets, curling into a ball on my side to try and conserve body heat. At least I’ll have company on my road trip. If Marco wants to come, that is. I already know that if he elects to stay behind, I’m going to let him. 

Another sigh. A sleepy voice comes from the bed. “Whassat?”

“Tell you in the morning.”

“… ‘S cold.”

I snort and lean up to look at him. His bedhead is something else, even from here. “Go back to sleep.”

He mumbles and obeys, pulling the (warmer, nicer) blanket over his head. 

Eventually I manage to fall back asleep too, apparently, because the next thing I know my phone is chirping pleasantly to inform me that it is now some shade of morning.

The apartment is still frozen, and the light coming in from the window is weak and grey. 

I reach over and slap at my phone until it shuts the hell up, then immediately retract my hand back into the safety of my warm blanket. I know my building’s heat is shit, but this is insane.

“Hey, Jean?”

I poke my head up and look around, my eyes settling on the blanket burrito that must be Marco. “Yeah?”

“… Nothing.”

Weird.

I sigh and sit up, bringing as much of the blanket with me as I can manage. He’s sitting up too, and for the amount of sleep we got, he kind of looks like crap. “What’s up?”

Marco runs his fingers through his messy hair. It looks like it might have dried into the very definition of ‘on-end’ in his sleep. I smirk a little until I realize that I probably look no better.

“It’s really nothing,” he sighs, giving me a smile. “I just had a weird dream, is all.”

I grunt in response and move into the kitchen, blanket and all, to put on the kettle. Instant coffee is the lifeblood I’m pretty sure we both need. Even if there’s only one mug. Dammit.

As I’m waiting for the thing to boil, I move back to the couch and grab my phone. One missed call from Levi and a voicemail. I hit the button and press the cold thing to my ear.

 _“Take him with you. You’re gonna need him to find the book.”_ Click. Short, sweet, to the point, and makes about as much sense as he had last night.

I look over at the red folder on the counter, next to the mug. The kettle starts to give an irate whistle, so I move to kill the fire. Apparently the power had come back on while we were out last night. I’d totally forgotten about it. 

As I’m stirring questionable-looking powder into the hot water, I flip open the folder and check out the contents. Few towns over indeed; this place is at least a five hour drive. Good thing it’s still before noon. Hopefully.

I bring the mug and the folder back to the couch and give Marco the coffee, which he accepts with a heartfelt thanks. A man after my own heart, clearly.

“Do you remember my phone ringing?”

He blows on the coffee, contemplating. “A little, yeah. What was that?”

“Levi called.” I run my chilly fingers through my hair. “About this next job I have.” He tilts his head. I give him a grin and draw the blanket closer around me. “Wanna go on a road trip?”

“Ah,” he mumbles, reaching up to rub at his eye. “I… I guess? Where to, and for what?”

I lean down to look at the notes scrawled across a printed-out property listing. Erwin’s handwriting is so official-looking, neat and curly compared to Levi’s rushed scrawl. “Says there’s something up with a library a few towns over. Looks like it might be a haunting.” I flip the page over, squinting at the remainder of the notes. 

One word in particular sticks out: ‘Edda.’ For some reason, that rings a bell, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I skim over the notes, not really paying attention.

Marco finishes his coffee, so I put the file down and liberate the mug for my turn.

We somehow manage to get dressed without freezing to death, though my poor junk is definitely experiencing some shrinkage. I keep my back to Marco as I hurriedly change my boxers and slide into my pants, shivering at the cold fabric on my bare skin. This might be a two-pairs-of-socks kind of road trip.

I manage to stuff him into my one winter coat, though he’s excessively polite about it. I’m fine with two hoodies, and I tell him as such, but he seems skeptical.

I lock the door behind us as we leave, patting my pockets just to make sure I have everything. Outside, the snow has stopped, and it seems like the city mostly got itself salted and settled. As we’re trudging to the subway, I can’t help but notice that the sudden temperature change has left an incredibly dense fog curling over the city. Pretty much can’t see more than two feet in front of me. That makes me nervous.

Shrinking into my seat on the train, I shiver a little. Even the subway car can’t escape the frozen tundra air that seeps through the tunnels.

“You never told me where it is we’re going,” Marco says, leaning forward to break me out of my introspection.

“Oh, my bad,” I reply, breathing hot into my hands and rubbing them together. “West a little bit, to Jinae.” Marco tenses visibly, and I raise my eyebrows. “You okay?”

He smiles at me, but even I can tell that it’s painfully forced. “Yup,” is his shaky reply.

The doors open at our stop, so I trip off the train and stuff my hands deep into my pockets. Only a few blocks to the car rental place. “Why don’t I believe you?”

He glances at me, shoulders drawn up against the wind coming from up top as we ascend the stairs. The fog hasn’t let up yet, and the lack of people on the street is unsurprising but kind of disturbing nonetheless. I turn in what I hope is the right direction and start down the street. 

Marco smiles at me as we walk, keeping step with me, and this one seems a little more relaxed. I decide not to press the point.

The warm air that greets me when I haul open the door to the Hertz is a more than welcome relief. The office’s walls are all glass, for all the good it does; the lot is completely obscured by fog at this point. I kick snow off my pant legs and look around.

There’s one guy working, if you can call it that; he’s big, blonde, and I’m fairly sure he’s actually passed out under that magazine over his face. I approach the desk and, just to be an ass, ring the big service bell not three feet from his face.

The lump jolts awake and the magazine covering his face falls to the floor. He blinks at me from under thick bangs.

“You Mike Zacharius?”

The guy stands and extends his hand over the desk, leaning forward a little too close for my comfort as he shakes my hand. I turn to Marco, but he’s over by the window, trying to squint out at the lot. 

“Rough day for driving,” Mike says, scratching at the back of his neck after he’s released my hand. “Did you call ahead?”

“Ah, um, Erwin Smith sent me over here.”

Mike blinks at me, looking me up and down, then sighs. “That guy never forgets the score.” I’m not entirely sure that I want to know what he means. “Can I see your license?”

I lick my lips a little. Of course. “I, uh, left it at home?” It’s bogus and he knows it.

He considers me for a moment longer, blinking slowly. After a while, he just shoves his hands in his pockets. “Make sure it comes back in one piece.” I nod, but he continues. “Or I’m gonna have to say you stole it.”

Gah. I nod again, trying really hard not to look shady. I really hope the highways have been plowed.

Mike sighs and turns, heading into the little back room behind the desk. I can hear keys jingling for a moment before he returns and tosses a small keyring to me. “Spot 37, grey Hyundai. Good luck digging it out.”

I stare at the key, then at him. “Do you, uh, have a shovel?”

He just smiles and sits back down in his chair, kicking his feet back up onto the desk. I guess not. I give him a sarcastic two-finger salute and turn toward the door, Marco falling into step behind me. The priest is being unusually quiet, but I guess this is pretty far out of his usual routine.

Still, something’s bugging me.

I dig around all the roughly Hyundai-looking cars until I find a grey one under a healthy pile of snow. With a sigh, I pull my hands into my sleeves and start ghetto-shoveling in front of the car. Marco helps me wordlessly, and I mumble a thanks at him.

The inside of the car is just as frigid as the air outside. I start the car and just let it sit for a few minutes while I rub my palms vigorously against my jeans. I can feel my frozen-ass thighs starting to regain feeling too, with that sharp prickling sensation spreading over them. 

“Hope you brought a book or something,” I say to Marco with a grin. He gives me a little half-smile, and seriously, what the _fuck_. Just yesterday Marco managed to bounce back from a genuinely life-changing series of events, but once I mention Jinae he goes all dark and wobbly on me? There’s something pretty fucked up about that. I hate to say it, but I’m worried. 

I reacquaint myself with all the gadgets and doodads that cars generally come with, turning on the headlights and giving the wipers an experimental jiggle, debating internally as I do so.

Finally, I turn to him again, my chilly hands in my lap. I pull the sleeves of my hoodies over my knuckles. “Hey, Marco…”

“Hmm?”

“If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. I can drop you off at Connie’s or something, he’ll keep you busy.”

Marco sighs and runs a hand through his hair. He’s looking out the window at all the… fog. I guess.

He traces his lips with his index finger, and does so for a while before he responds. “I’ll go,” he says, and he kind of leaves it at that.

I’m losing my mind a little.

I fiddle with the radio until I find something reasonable and blast it, cluing Marco in to my displeasure at his sudden coldness. I’m being immature, I know, but it’s cold and early and I just kind of feel like being a petulant brat.

With a deep breath, I finally put the car in drive (thankfully, it’s not a stick) and roll awkwardly over the piles of snow between us and the mostly-cleared streets. It’s been a while since I’ve driven. There’s really no point in the city, it’s more of a nuisance than anything.

We get onto the much clearer westbound freeway after half an hour of what feels like slush off-roading to the tune of whatever classic rock the station feels like spraying at us, and I’m both frustrated and confused that Marco hasn’t moved in a while.

Either he’s gonna spill, or this is going to be a long five hours.

\--

Turns out half an hour is the limit of my patience. We’re cruising at fifty, because that’s about as fast as I want to chance it with this fog. Somehow, it hasn’t burned off. The air that manages to break through is dim and grey, and entirely unconvincing as far as daylight goes. 

I turn down the radio and slump down in my seat, steering with one hand while the other rests in my lap. The heat has long since kicked in. Marco had tossed my coat in the back seat, the sleeves of his hoodie rolled up to his elbows, his gaze maddeningly trained out the window. 

“Hey, Marco,” I try again, and he turns toward me. I lick my lips, hesitating. “What did you and Eren talk about?”

He blinks at me and looks surprised. “Um,” is his masterful response, one hand coming up to scratch at the back of his head. I look back at the road, watching road signs pop up out of nowhere. It’s about noon now, and the fog hasn’t even pretended like it’s going anywhere. “Like I said, it looked like something was bothering him, so I tried to make conversation.” He cracks his knuckles in his lap. “I asked how he knew you, how long he’d worked there, stuff like that.” Marco smiles at me, and I catch it out of the corner of my eye. “Sort of trying to get his mind off whatever it was, you know?”

I can’t help but smile myself. Marco’s seriously something else. The more we hang out, the more I realize it. I wonder if it’s his nature, or if it’s the holy man in him. 

The air feels a little less tense between us, and I’m immensely grateful for that. For some reason, tension between us is more unbearable than with anyone else. I guess I got too used to his bubbly side too quickly, or something.

His fingers tap out the rhythm to “Come On, Eileen” on his thigh as we drive, his posture visibly more relaxed. 

A little more time passes, and it’s a little more time where I don’t feel like I’m going to grind my teeth down to nothing. My dentist always cracked down on me about that. Nervous habit.

I switch into the middle lane, uselessly checking my mirrors as I do, and move onto the freeway toward Jinae. The road signs are basically useless at that point, completely invisible until we’re right under them. I shift down further in my seat and dig my phone out of my pocket, handing it to Marco.

“Can you get us directions? The address is in that folder,” I say as I gesture toward the back seat. He complies, arching back to grab the folder from under the coat. 

Honestly, I’d kind of expected him to be clueless about the world of Google maps, given that I haven’t seen him use a cell phone in the entire time he’s been with me. Maybe it’s still at the church or something. Anyway, he’s got the navigation up and running quickly enough, setting my phone in the cup holder. 

The soothing voice tells me to continue on the highway for another ninety-two miles. Great. I sigh and run a hand through my hair. 

Marco looks through the few papers in the folder as we trek through the fog. It’s been a while since I’ve seen another car. 

“You said it was a library?”

“That’s what the paper says, I think.”

He looks more closely at the printed-out rental ad. After a few moments of silence, Marco hums and scratches his head.

“Mm?”

“This, uh…” He stops to think for a second, then sighs. “This library’s been up for rent for something like… fifteen years.”

I blink and glance at him, just for a moment. “It says that on there?”

Marco licks his lips. “No. I remember when it shut down.”

I look at him again, for as long as I dare before I look back to the road. “Okay, what exactly is it with you and Jinae? Ever since I told you that’s where we’re going, you’ve been really weird.”

Marco slouches down in his seat, his knees bumping up against the dashboard. It seems like he might be a little long for this car.

“I was born there.”

“Okay…?”

He’s looking out the window again, so different from what I’d assumed was normal. 

“I was born there, went to school there, and then I left for seminary. That’s pretty much it.”

“Oh, bullshit.” He looks at me, surprised, and I tap my thumb against the steering wheel. “If you don’t want to tell me, then just say that. Don’t lie right to me.”

He bites his lip and looks at the papers spread across his lap. “Sorry.”

I sigh, feeling guilty again. “No, I’m sorry, man. It’s obviously a sore spot, I shouldn’t be poking you in it.”

Marco chuckles a little and closes the folder, tucking it back into the backseat. “It’s been a long time, you’d think I’d be over it. I guess I just… didn’t really have a good time growing up.”

I raise my eyebrows a little, legitimately surprised. I have to physically bite my lip to keep from asking him a million questions. My GPS chirps up at us, “Continue for sixty miles.”

After a while of silence between us, I’m starting to wonder how bad things really were for Marco. I’m nothing if not incredibly curious.

Maybe a trade. “Did I ever tell you how I got into the business?”

Marco looks over at me, then turns toward me a little. He fidgets with his fingers in his lap and shakes his head. 

This is definitely a story I haven’t told in a long time. Not because I’m particularly sensitive, just due to lack of opportunity. “Okay, so, when I was ten I climbed trees a lot, right? I wasn’t really that good at it, and I kept slipping and skinning my knees and shit, but I still tried to climb these trees every day.” I can see him smiling a little, and I return the gesture, my hand sliding to the top of the steering wheel. “Well, one time, I tried to climb the biggest tree in the park. It was a sort of rite of passage, right? Like, all the big kids climbed this tree and sat way up high in it.”

I pause for a moment, chuckling a little. It’s an incredibly stupid story, now that I think about it. “So, I’m climbing this tree, trying to be like the big kids. And I get up really high with only a few scrapes and scratches, and I’m feeling really proud of myself, right? Well, then I slipped.” I lick my lips a little, definitely not for the drama. Marco’s watching me attentively. “I fell, and then I cracked my head off a branch a good ways down.” This is about the point where I don’t actually remember anything, and for good reason. Dead people tend not to make new memories.

I rake my bangs back far enough that Marco can see the faded scar across my hairline, on the right side of my forehead above my temple. He leans forward and squints a little, then hums. Pretty average reaction to the usual childhood scars discussion.

“They said I was already dead by the time I got to the ER,” I continue. Marco’s breath catches a little. “I guess they just kind of left me in a hallway for a while, I dunno, maybe it was busy that day. But when I woke up, I had a huge headache, and Levi was standing over me with that charming expression of his.” I laugh a little. He hasn’t aged a day in sixteen years. Well, maybe a little.

“How?”

I shrug. “We’re not really sure. I don’t remember anything, and Levi said he’d just gotten there to pick me up. Either way, my parents about shat themselves. The hospital really loved that settlement, I’ll tell you what.”

Marco laughs a little, still facing me. “So then what?”

I lick my lips and wince. This part of the story does actually hurt a little. “I started seeing things.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I laugh drily, glancing over at him. “The first one came out of my closet. I wish I could say it was the last time I ever pissed my pants, but that’d be a huge lie.” I tilt my neck to the sides, stretching it out. “And from then on, it’s just pretty much been that way. Levi started giving me jobs when I was pissed off and getting violent in high school. Taking out my hormonal rage or something. After that, I just never really quit.”

Marco exhales slowly, turning to look out the front of the car again. He’s silent for a while, and I feel like he’s churning my story over in his mind.

“Continue thirty miles,” the GPS adds.

“That’s really something,” Marco says finally, fingers laced loosely in his lap. 

“You think so?”

“Yep. It’s probably way cooler than my story.”

Oh, score!

I make a casual sound and run my fingers over the steering wheel, doing my best not to look excited.

“Yeah,” he says after a while, picking at his thumbnail. “I just, ah… I had a lot of anger issues when I was little. They mellowed out around second grade or so, but the damage to my social life was kind of done already. I ended up going to seminary so I could travel before settling down at a church somewhere.” He sighs and looks out his window again. 

After a while, he asks, “Have you ever been to Jinae?” I shake my head and merge into the next lane, since the phone says our exit is coming up in a bit. I’ll be damned if I can see anything. “It’s not great. I just wanted to get away from home, I think. Travel around, see the sights.”

“Did you?”

He laughs, a real laugh this time, and the sound is almost relieving. “Yeah, it was cool. I lived in France and Germany for a while before I ended up in Trost.”

I raise an eyebrow, looking over at Marco. “You chose _Trost_ over Europe?”

“I like my church!” He reaches in front of himself, stretching a little. “The community is great, and it’s all kinds of people, from kids to old folk. They all have really great stories to tell, even if some of them are from when the area was sort of falling apart.” A smile spreads across my face again. It feels warm. Maybe that’s the heater. “They’re all really faithful. Like the good kind, not the fair-weather kind. I really enjoy service with them.” He scratches his head and laughs. “Sorry, I think I got carried away.”

“Nah,” I say, glancing down at my phone. “It’s nice to hear someone who’s actually excited about something in Trost. Mostly what you hear are foiled escape attempts.”

I slow down and take our exit, my GPS shrilling directions at me endlessly. It seems like it’s getting confused. I merge onto another highway, the fog no less dense here than it had been on the interstate. I’m kind of hoping for coffee at some point soon. 

My phone sorts itself out and we settle back into a comfortable silence. I feel a little better, but something is still a little off. I get the sneaking suspicion, as usual, that I’m not getting the whole story.

The highway turns into Jinae’s main road, a two-lane, pothole-ridden mess. My GPS is going nuts again, rerouting every time it manages to catch signal. Marco reaches down and shuts it off, giving me directions from memory. 

To be honest, Jinae’s kind of a shithole. I hate to say it, but it is. Everything is dirty, the roads are lumpy, the shops are questionable, and there are entire blocks of rotten, broken-down buildings, just sitting around and waiting to collapse. The gaping, broken windows loom dark out of the fog. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies. 

When we pull up in front of the library, I just kind of stare at it for a bit. Words escape me.

The building certainly looks like it’s been abandoned for years. The entrance is heavily tagged and blocked off with a rusty chain-link fence, several realtor signs hanging lopsided from the thin metal. Its windows are boarded over too, broken glass littering the ground.

It’s already starting to get dark when I pull the keys out of the ignition and step out into the frigid, smelly Jinae air. 

“Damn,” I manage, stuffing my hands into my hoodie pockets.

Marco sighs, shrugging into my coat. “Yep.”

I open the back door of the car and pull out the folder, leafing through it to try and get some idea of what I’m working with. The reports are vague. Things moving around, funny smells, potential buyers feeling really threatened, abandoned and disused… the usual. I flip to the page that talks about the book again and read the short note about it.

_‘500+ pages, brown leather, Edda. Writing inside. Does not want to be found.’_

Well, isn’t that just fucking super. I grimace. Marco’s staring up at the library, his hands in his pockets. Levi’s voicemail comes to mind again. I need Marco to find the book, but the book doesn’t want to be found…

“Hey, Marco.” He turns to me. I hand him the paper over the roof of the car. “This book sound familiar to you?”

He takes the paper, leaning his elbows on shiny grey paint, and scans the page. “Mm, not really, but like I said, it’s been fifteen years.” He hands the page back and gives me a weak half-smile. I stuff the folder back into the car and pull out my cigarettes. 

As I light the thing and inhale, I turn to lean against the car and look around. We’re the only car parked on this crappy little road, and no one else is around. The gas station across the way is poorly-lit, but the yellow light makes a huge, fuzzy ball in the mist. Jinae looks basically uninhabited.

“Yo,” I say over my shoulder, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “Do people actually live here?”

“I think so.”

I turn to look at him. He’s still leaning on the top of the car, chin resting on his folded arms. “Where are they?”

He shrugs. One hand comes up to rub at the bridge of his nose, dark eyes sliding shut. I choose not to mention it. Instead, I take another good puff off my cigarette and look up and down the street. A stoplight further up makes loud, clunking noises as it shifts uselessly. Green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red…

“Are we here for that book?”

“Kind of,” I say, broken free from my train of thought. I finish my smoke and grind it out under my heel, coming around to stand next to Marco. “There’s something there, making people feel weird, so.” Giving him my best ‘up-to-no-good’ grin, I nudge his elbow with mine. “Ready for a little breaking and entering?”

\--

Turns out the back door was unlocked. I’m grateful for this, especially since the fog is that much thicker after the sun goes down, but I wish I’d been smart enough to try it before attempting to wiggle in through an air duct and getting stuck.

Once Marco’s done chuckling at me, I shut the door behind us, and it seems like all the sound in the world has been left outside. A low ringing starts in my ears. The air is thick and cool around us, but thankfully not bitingly cold. Still, I’m a little nervous. It’s dark in here, and I’m not sure what I’m going up against.

Marco sticks close by my side. “How do we do this?” he breathes into my ear, and my hair stands on end. 

“Just, uh…” I think for a moment. 

The library stands just as it must have looked fifteen years ago, books and all. It’s like one day they just locked up for the night and then no one ever came back. There’s dust everywhere, cobwebs joining leaning tomes to the shelves they rest on, and above all else, it is _dark_. I wait for a moment for my eyes to adjust, breathing in the stale air.

Under the low ringing filling my mind, I hear a soft scratching sound, followed by several thumps. Marco apparently hears it too, tensing and moving closer to me. 

That’s as good a start as any; I head in the direction of the sound, stepping softly and carefully across the floor. Marco’s hand holds tight onto the back of my hoodie, and for some reason, that doesn’t annoy me.

I shake my head slightly. No time for that now.

I look between the shelves as we pass until I see the main desk, off to the side. Everything is grey with dust, including the frumpy old woman signing library returns in and stacking books ever higher. Marco tenses, his breath catching, and I stand up straight. Good, good.

Moving through the aisles easily, I can almost hear Marco sweating as I roll up to the worn-down desk and lean against it, smiling charmingly at the librarian.

“Excuse me,” I say, and she shushes me, not looking up from her work. She snaps a book shut, releasing a cloud of dust in my face, and I cough a little.

After a few repeats of the opening-signing-closing-dust in my face routine, she looks up at me impatiently.

“Can I help you?” Her voice is raspy, and it sounds like it’s coming through water a hundred feet away. A chill runs down my spine, but I try to keep my face relaxed. Her curly brown hair hangs loose around her ears, tucked behind one as she looks at me.

“I’m looking for a book. Can you help me?” 

Marco’s behind me, and I can feel him twisting, looking around, looking anywhere but at the old woman who most certainly should not be there.

“Yes, yes, go ahead,” she says, and her form withers suddenly into dust. Her particles fall to the floor with a ‘whoompf,’ motes rising on the stale air to assault my face again. I rub a hand down my face, grimacing.

Undeterred, I continue, turning to look around the place. Marco is rubbing at his forehead, brow furrowed. “I think it’s called ‘ _Edda_ ’? My friend said you have it.” I glance over at him, raising an eyebrow, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

I hear a rustling coming from a few aisles over, so I push away from the desk and move toward it. Marco’s hand comes fast and grabs my arm tight, so I turn to look at him. He’s not looking so hot. I want to ask if he wants to wait outside, but I don’t trust this town with him. I’d rather have him a little green about the gills and by my side than outside where I can’t see him.

“Are you okay?” I turn to him fully, leaning close. 

“It’s nothing,” he whispers back, looking around. I can see sweat beading on his brow, and it’s like thirty degrees in here. “Just a headache.”

That sets off alarms in my head.

“Hang in there, okay? We’re gonna get the book and get out of here.”

He doesn’t look at me. I glance over my shoulder, listening to the librarian mutter as she moves through the aisles. Gesturing for him to follow, I turn and move quietly toward her. 

She’s shuffling miserably up and down the same two aisles. Her path winds her around the same bookshelf over and over, her gnarled hand trailing along the spines of the books as she passes them. The sound is constant and loud in the musty air. The sign on the shelf reads what I can only assume to be ‘theology,’ although the sign is cracked and faded, hanging from one loose screw. 

As she circles the shelves, her muttering grows stronger, quicker, and we stand there and watch her limp in a circle.

I decide to test my luck.

“Is it here?”

She’s gone when I look next, mostly because her face is right beside my ear, and her cracking shush is deafening. I wince, covering my ear, but she’s already gone. The sound lingers in the center of my skull, scratching at important brain pieces, and I scrape my nails through my hair in an attempt to dislodge the discomfort spreading through my being. Marco shakes beside me, pressing close against my side.

I look around, nerves on edge, but I don’t hear or see the woman. The air is still, quiet, and her footsteps remain in the dust, the same crooked loop around the shelves.

“Do you smell that?” I startle a little, not having expected Marco to breathe his question into my ear again, but I appreciate him being quiet about it. The old librarian unsettles me. I much preferred when her voice was distant, echoing from deep within fifteen years ago. 

He looks at me, pale in the gloom, and I sniff cautiously.

Oh. Yeah, I smell that.

Burning.

Shit.

I look around, scanning for smoke, for flames, for anything, but this isn’t like a paper-burning smell. This is deep. Organic. It stinks like tar. 

“We need to get out of here,” I mutter, looking back toward the shelves. I move toward them, looking at the faded spines of the books, hoping and hoping and _hoping_ that it will just jump out at me so we can leave.

Marco hasn’t moved. He’s stock still, refusing to come near, his eyes glassy. I’m very alarmed by this. “Marco,” I hiss, moving back in front of him. He blinks at me. “Marco, hey, you with me?”

He looks genuinely confused, breaking eye contact to look around. Moving around me, he moves to the other side of the shelf, and I shrug. Hopefully it’s just a passing thing. I return to my side, fingers tracing the spines, muttering, “ _Edda, Edda, Edda_ …”

Where have I heard that before?

The sound of wood splintering hits me like a punch in the ear; I startle, bolting to the other side of the shelf, and the tar smell is suddenly so strong that I feel light-headed. Marco is kneeling on the ground, cracked wood tossed to the side, and his hands are deep under the floorboards. I look around nervously for the librarian, but she’s conspicuously absent.

“Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” I come cautiously to his side and kneel down, and that’s about the point that I notice that his nose is bleeding. Profusely. His eyes are heavily bloodshot, too.

 _‘Just a headache,’_ I remember, and I look down at his hands.

If it’s dark under the floorboards of the library, it’s not because there’s no light. The blackness oozes up over his arms, sticking to his sleeves, and the smell is overwhelming. He leans in up to his elbows, tar leaking up and spreading over the dirty wood floor, and I’m really torn about whether or not I should stop him. 

Steam comes off the tar. The ringing in my ears rises to what sounds like a guttural whine, and the itching in my brain returns. I wince, smacking the side of my head briefly before turning back to the priest. “Hey, Marco? Buddy?”

He stands slowly, and the tar seems hesitant to release him. In fact, I’d almost swear that the splotches of black around his biceps are shaped like fingers. He is eventually released, though, and stands to his full height, blood starting to drip from his chin now. One of his unfocused eyes floods red as a large hematoma spreads over the white, and I stand up quickly. 

In his hands is a gobby, vaguely book-shaped package, and it _stinks_.

Marco unwraps the package slowly, and the wrapping falls to the ground with a wet, sickening ‘thpppp’ kind of sound. The book underneath is clean but for where his tarry hands hold it.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter, looking from him to the book. This has to be it, and if it isn’t, I don’t really care. I place a gentle hand on his shoulder and turn him toward the back door, and he follows my guiding silently.

A bubbling sound comes from behind us as we exit the aisle. Ever the idiot, I turn to check it out.

The thing coming up from the spreading tar arches its back slowly, head dripping, and two slit-like eyes peer at me from under the goo.

Just as soon as I notice it, as my hands move to shove Marco toward the closer front door, it bursts into flame. The flames curl around its form with a deafening roar, and the dust motes swirling around it ignite into hot ash. 

“Oh,” is all I can manage, eyes wide. Marco stares at it listlessly, his one bloody eye dark.

The black surface of the creature cracks and dries as it stands, flexing its hands. The coating flakes off of its fingers, revealing the thing’s hot, molten core. The flames are sucked into the cracks, swirling around the lava it seems to have inside, and it tilts its head at me. The fire behind its eyes flashes, and that’s all the warning I need.

I manage to shove Marco out of the way just as it bolts at us, moving unnaturally quickly, and as I sprint toward the front door, I drag the priest behind me.

My heart is pounding. The heavy front door is nailed shut. Mouth dry, I whip my head from side to side, and all I hear is the piercing ringing emanating from somewhere inside my panic.

Picking up a chair, I knock the plywood and the remaining glass out of what used to be a huge picture window. The glass cuts my hands and knee as I vault through the window, turning to Marco once I land. He looks at me, and I can see the fire demon, the boogey man, whatever the shit that is coming around the corner with a bizarre, jilted walk.

I yell Marco’s name, holding my hands to him through the window, and his eyes focus. Then they cross a little, and he whimpers, oily hands moving to clutch his head. I reach through the window further, glass cutting my stomach, and grab his shoulders, pulling him to me. He seems to get the picture and ambles through the window, and I almost fall to the ground under his weight when he collapses against me. I dig my shoulder into his ribs and support him as best I can, pulse hammering rapidly in my throat.

The keys are stuffed deep in my pocket. As I half-drag Marco over to the car, I don’t dare look behind us. I press the unlock button, rip the back door open and toss the priest bodily into the backseat. Slamming the door, I sprint to the other side and leap into the driver’s seat, hands shaking. The car smells already, the ooze covering Marco staining every part of the car. I jam the keys in the ignition and turn them perhaps a little too hard, and something in the steering column cracks. The car starts, though, and it screams as I burn rubber right the fuck out of there.

The car drifts across some slush as I round the corner at the useless stoplight, accelerating anywhere that isn’t there. Marco’s in the backseat, making pained noises and panting, and I hope to whatever god likes him the most that he’s not bleeding into his skull.

As I loop back onto Jinae’s main road, the fog pressing close in the darkness, an image flashes in front of my eyes.

something hot

so damn hot

it’s fire

fire fire fire am i on fire

i’m going to die here

The image flashes away for a second, then comes back twice as big, twice as bright, what looks like a solar flare arcing across my vision. It’s hot, I’m sweating, my face is melting, I’m dying

Marco’s dying

I jerk the steering wheel hard. The fiery thing grins at me, curling up around me from the edges of my consciousness.

Its hot grin is burned into my vision. The road and the fog are blurry and pale around the blackness of its teeth. I notice dimly that the world is spinning in the windshield, the road taking turns being under me then over me then under me again. A crack spreads through the windshield and disappears under the hazy after-image.

A street lamp jutting downwards into the sky appears out of the fog and folds the front of my car.

The black grin fades over my vision, and then everything is dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eheh
> 
> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com).


	4. Mad World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying not to overthink this, but god dammit, he's making it hard. If I never have to see Jinae again, it'll be too soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i guess you could probably listen to [the silent hill 2 ost](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFvt2cNSOaM) while you read this. if you're into that sort of thing. not mandatory.
> 
> i still have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

When I open my eyes, I’m standing alone inside an elevator. My hands are clean, as is my hoodie, free of the soot and tar that had covered me when the car flipped. I turn quickly, looking around, but the elevator is empty, pristine, muzak pouring lightly from the speakers. I look up at the white ceiling, then to the buttons lined up on the panel. 

Without thinking about it, I reach forward and press the button for my floor.

The plastic ring around the button lights up, but before the elevator can move it fades away again. I blink at it and press it again, a few more times, but every time the press fails to register. I sigh and lean against the clean steel wall, head falling against the cool metal with a thud.

A few moments of standing there, a horrible tinkly version of “Wonderwall” assaulting my ears. I open my eyes again, and Marco’s standing in front of me. He smiles at me softly, his right eye bright red, blood crusting on his lips and under his ears. He’s dirty, and tar is dripping from his fingers, but his smile is sweet and comforting.

I smile back, reaching up to chip some of the congealed blood off of his cheek with my thumb nail. He leans into my hand, closing his eyes.

His face is so dirty, so dark under the bright lights of the elevator. When I open my mouth to say so, the sound of my voice is lost in the cheesy music surrounding us.

I lean off the wall and move closer to Marco, resting my other hand on his face as well. My thumbs brush dirt and dust and blood away from his freckles. He opens his eyes again to look at me. I wonder aloud if we’re stuck here. My words, again, don’t make it into the air. He smiles wider anyway, eyes narrowing and crinkling into laughter lines at the edges.

“Did you try hitting the button?”

I give him a look. He raises his hands in a placating gesture. My fingers slip away from his face, and I reach over to hit the button for my floor again. He watches the light come on, blink off, ignoring my presses, and laughs quietly.

“I don’t think that floor’s open, Jean,” he says, pressing the button for the lobby. His fingers leave a black smear across the button. The elevator moves smoothly downward, and he turns back toward me, reaching over to brush his knuckles against my cheek. “You can’t go there yet. We still have work to do.”

My voice is stolen again as I question him, but he closes his eyes and fades away as the doors open. I blink, looking out into the smooth tan marble of the lobby, and step out of the elevator.

\--

The first thing I’m aware of is the smell of burning, once again. Not as mind-bending as whatever had burped up that hellspawn, but infinitely more urgent.

That is absolutely the smell of a car on fire.

I cough, opening my eyes, and the world is upside-down. I’m hanging by my seatbelt, which I don’t remember fastening. The car is crushed against the pole. The fire is bright, burning off the mist around me. As I draw gasoline-infused air into my lungs, panic sets in again.

Wrestling with my seatbelt, I twist to look into the backseat, and my heart drops into my stomach when I find it empty. The rest of my body follows suit, crashing gracelessly to the roof of the car when my seatbelt gives. I reach back, feeling around the roof of the car, and my fingers hit the sticky, warm cover of the book.

Wriggling and squeezing, I manage to crawl out of the car’s broken, crumpled window without too much damage.

The fire from the car spews poisonous, pitch-black fumes into the air, and I pull my shirt over my nose, coughing a deep, struggling, hacking cough. As I move away from the car, I hear the thing groaning. The sound of metal screaming sounds clear over the rush of the flames. I look around for Marco and spot my stained coat abandoned on a curb.

I reach into my pocket, ducking my head to keep my shirt over my nose, and pull out my phone. The thing is flipping out, the screen turning on and off and back on again. The back is incredibly hot, like the battery is on fire. I shove it back into my pocket.

How the fuck am I supposed to find Marco?

Taking a deep breath through my shirt, I think carefully. The only sign of life I’d seen was from the gas station, but there’s literally no way I’m going anywhere fucking near that library again. Ever. That place can burn. And it probably is.

I look around helplessly, moving away from my bright, burning car, and notice something. It’s quiet, but for the sound of the wreckage. 

There’s a flipped car on fire in the middle of a good-sized intersection in front of a bunch of houses right around dinner time, and there isn’t a sound. No cars, no sirens, no concerned tittering from onlookers.

Suddenly I’m not convinced that anyone actually lives in Jinae.

I take another steadying breath, coughing out the stray smoke that had found its way up into my shirt, and look around at the ground. Anything, any hints as to where Marco might be, anything at all. I close my eyes and listen. I’m actually upset that I’m not a psychic like Levi.

That’s when the headache sets in.

Be careful what you wish for, right?

I stumble further from the fire, gulping in big mouthfuls of air, but even that isn’t sufficient to keep my head from spinning. A tinny whistle erupts from my phone, I think, and I yank the thing out of my pocket with every intention of hurling it back into the wreckage.

The sound, appeased, dulls into white noise and then silence.

I focus, my head pounding, and stuff the sticky book into my armpit. There are patterns in the flashing images on the screen. I stare at it with distaste. This thing has to be fucking with me.

Stuffing it back in my pocket, I straighten up again, looking around. The flames from the car light the buildings, and they look almost fake in the wavering light. The whining from my phone starts up again. It whips upward in a loud, shrill crescendo, and then dies down, the sound dissolving into a low hum. I look at the ground, covered with dirty slush, then back at the car.

It’s with a new determination that I turn away from the fire and run up the street, hell bent on finding Marco. 

As much as I had hoped that the crash had knocked some psychic into me, that does not appear to be the case. I’m running blind through foggy Jinae, swinging a book that came up from god knows where, looking at the buildings as I fly by them with literally no idea where I’m going. It occurs to me that my head probably hurts because a car had just played basketball with it. My eye and nose hurt, and I’m fairly sure that I bit my cheeks something fierce because I have to keep spitting out blood, but I don’t have time to stop.

I’m following my gut at this point. It’s all I have.

I sprint up a small side street, looking around for Marco but not daring to yell his name, my heart pounding harder with every street light I pass through. 

I nearly miss him. 

He’s standing in a cone of light barely visible in the mist. I run past the street at first, confused until my brain catches up, before jogging back and turning up the street.

Just standing there, he stares at a house that looks identical to all the rest. I slow to a cautious creep as I approach him. There’s no telling what state of mind he’s in right now.

“Marco?” My voice cracks. I stand still at the edge of my own street light, a cautionary distance between us, and I just watch him. He sways slightly, then looks down at his black, sticky hands. I take a few steps toward him, the book sliding in my sweaty palm, and call his name again.

He lurches forward, out of the streetlight, and opens the shitty, creaking metal gate to the row house in front of us. I trail after him cautiously, wishing that I had a gun, a knife, anything. All I have is this stupid book.

The front door opens easily under his fingers. He slides into the big living room, leaving the door open, and I follow him quietly. Probably best to leave the door open. Marco makes a dismissing waving motion at the faded, dirty couch and starts up the stairs, his dirty fingers dragging along the railing as he goes. The stairs squeak, more under my feet than his, and it seems like he knows where all the creaky spots in the stairs are.

I want to ask him, but I’m not convinced that he’s there.

We stop at the top of the stairs and Marco sucks on his upper lip, leaning against the wall. He runs a hand through his hair before he turns and sits on the top step, burying his face in his knees.

The way he looks here reminds me of how he’d looked in my living room, quaking and tiny.

I kneel on the step in front of him, placing the book next to him on the top stair, and move to rest my shaking fingers on his arms.

“Hey, Marco?”

He sighs and looks up at me, but he’s not really looking at me. Not that I can see, anyway. It’s weird, him staring straight through me, but I shake his arms gently anyway. His right eye is bright, even in the darkness, the hematoma having spread to the corners of his eye. 

I sigh and stand up again, raking a hand through my hair. At least I found him, but we’re currently stuck in Jinae with no real way to leave. Fucking hellspawn. I refuse to take the blame for this one.

Looking up at the top floor, I notice that a door on the side is open, but something is stretched across the doorway. Curious, I move around Marco and onto the landing.

The room is the bathroom, and the something stretched across is police tape. I frown at it before pulling lightly at it, and the old adhesive gives easily. The yellow plastic flutters slowly to the floor. I step into the bathroom.

It’s dark, of course; there aren’t any lights in this whole damn town, I’m pretty sure, not beyond the streetlights. A faint yellowish tinge from one comes through the frosted window. It discolors the tub, but I’m one hundred percent sure that the dark smears at the bottom of the bathtub are blood.

My stomach turns.

My phone goes off in my pocket, the sound piercing, and I startle out of my skin. My heart pounds as I pull it out. It’s stopped freaking out. The screen shows clearly that Levi’s calling me.

“Levi—”

“Where are you?”

I huff. “Jinae, where you sent me. What the fuck is so important about this book? Who the hell even called this job in?”

Static, then Levi’s voice again, slightly fuzzy. “That’s the thing. I saw it and thought the old bat was the problem.”

“But she’s—”

“She’s the one that called for help. Don’t fucking ask me how.”

I turn, reaching to pinch the bridge of my nose, but the movement is incredibly painful. I look in the dingy mirror, squinting, and notice with a fair amount of chagrin that my nose appears to be broken. Dark bruises are already spreading outwards across my eyes, like the bags weren’t bad enough on their own. Awesome.

“Anyway, the book, what—”

“Bring it back here. You still have the priest?”

I lean over and peer into the hallway. He’s still hunched at the top of the stairs, almost lifeless. “Yeah. But he’s weird, he’s been weird…”

“Weird how.”

“I dunno. He got a headache, and one of his eyes blew out, and he started bleeding, and now he doesn’t see me, and—”

“Jean. Breathe.”

I stop and suck a deep breath between my teeth. I reach into my hoodie pocket and pull out my squished but mostly intact cigarettes, sliding one out and between my lips.

“Levi, what do I do?” I light the cigarette with shaking fingers. “Uh, am I dead?”

“Dead people don’t need phones.”

Exhaling exasperatedly, I send him my best mental glare.

“Stop that.”

Ah, fuck.

“Let me talk to him.”

“Dude, he doesn’t respond to me. How am I gonna make him take a phone call?”

“Are you an idiot? Hold the phone to his head.”

I roll my eyes, pulling the phone away at a sharp arc of static, and move to crouch behind Marco. I pull my hoodie sleeve down over my fist, cigarette hanging loose in my lips, and wipe the blood away from his ear before pressing my phone to it. It had almost seemed for a moment like he’d leaned into the touch, but I probably imagined it.

I hear Levi’s voice rumble across the phone and into Marco’s ear, and he sags a little bit, falling back into me. I plop ungracefully onto my butt, unbalanced by his weight, but quickly move to accommodate him, my legs on either side of him. He leans back onto my shoulder. I take care to move my cigarette so that it doesn’t burn him, then lean my chin onto his shoulder. He’s cold.

The sound of Levi’s voice dies out after a while, after I’ve crushed my cigarette out on the stair next to me, and Marco is incredibly heavy against me. I pull the phone away and listen for a second. It’s just white noise. I click my tongue and hang up, dropping the phone next to me.

“Hey, Marco,” I murmur, reaching up to clean the cracking blood off his other ear. “You sleeping, guy?”

He doesn’t respond, but his eyes are closed.

“I don’t want to stay here much longer. Wake up, okay?”

Still nothing. I sigh and light another cigarette.

“Please don’t smoke in here,” Marco mumbles, and I jump about a mile. 

“Jesus, dude.”

“It’s my dad’s house.” He opens his eyes blearily and looks at me. We sit like this for a moment longer, until he has a second to think about that. Sitting bolt upright, Marco whips his head around, checking out his surroundings. I ignore his request to not smoke in his abandoned, cold-ass house, inhaling a rebellious lungful of smoke. “Jean,” he starts, turning to stand shakily on the stairs. “How did we get here?”

I lean back on my hands, cigarette hanging from the corner of my lips. “You tell me. We crashed, and you ran off.”

Marco looks down at me, then past me into the hall. He winces then, pressing his tacky hands to the sides of his head. “Ah, I have a huge headache…”

“Tell me about it.” I billow smoke at him. “Your brains basically melted, Padre. You had a class-A psychic freakout in the library, I think.”

He looks down at me again, then shakes his head. “No way. I’m not psychic. There’s no such thing.”

I snort, then lift the book and wave it at him. “You found this without any help. That’s how you got all that goo on you, too. You think I just rolled you around in an oil spill?”

He looks at his hands with disdain. Sighing, he comes around me up the stairs, approaching the bathroom slowly. I notice his hesitance at the doorway, a hundred hidden emotions flickering over his face, but he moves inside regardless.

The tap rumbles at first, hollering with disuse, then spits out what I imagine is absolutely putrid tap water. I hear him washing his hands, though, and I’m tempted to tell him to take a shower too.

I stand and move to lean against the doorway next to him, sucking a drag off my cigarette. I nod at the tub. “What’s that?”

He stiffens and doesn’t look. He turns to me instead, shaking the water off of his hands. “How are we getting out of here?”

I stare at him, my expression letting him know that I absolutely see his bullshit, but I turn away with a sigh and reach up to run a hand through my dusty, dirty hair. “We need a car. The other one’s totaled.” I turn back to him, leaning against the hallway wall. “You have one here?”

He shakes his head, coming out of the bathroom and closing the door quietly behind himself. “I don’t know that it’s still here. Or where the keys are.”

“We’ll have to find one, then.” I lean off the wall again and head down the stairs, stopping to grab the book along the way. Whatever this thing is, it had better be worth its weight in gold. Before I head out the front door, I turn to look back up the stairs. Marco’s still up there, staring at the bathroom door with an expression I’ve never seen on him before.

The best I can describe it as is ‘dark.’ He looks angry, his now-clean hands fisted at his side. The look passes, though, and as he pulls the hoodie sleeves over his knuckles, the expression is replaced by an absolutely heart-wrenching sadness. I turn away and flick my cigarette off the porch, immediately lighting another one.

My chest hurts. 

I hear him jog down the stairs and come out behind me, closing the door behind himself before he moves to my side. I give it a second before I look at him.

He doesn’t look back at me. He’s just staring at the porch, hands stuffed into his hoodie pockets, tar spreading around the fabric from his sleeves as he does so. So much for having washed his hands. 

Holding my cigarette tight between my lips, I reach over to him and unzip his hoodie, pulling the fabric from his shoulders before he has a chance to protest. I use it to wipe him off as best I can before I toss it in the bushes. His hands come up to rub at his arms, his skin breaking out in goosebumps, and I can already see the protest forming on his lips when I reach up to unzip the top hoodie I’m wearing.

“Stop,” I mumble, not looking at him as I hand it to him. This one’s warmer, lined with fleece or some shit, and he knows it. I really hope he doesn’t know that the one I’m left with is about as thick as my t-shirt. The look on his face is knowing, though, and bordering on sad again. I turn away so I don’t have to look at it, tossing the proffered hoodie over his big dumb polite face. “We’re gonna steal a car. Please don’t tell the Big Guy.”

I jog down the steps to the street and start looking around. No cars on the street, and row homes don’t have garages generally. Great. When Marco joins me, he’s zipping the hoodie up over his shirt, and I’m relieved by that. A little smile is curling the corners of his lips. I really hope it’s from my dumb joke. 

“Any ideas where we might find a car?”

He crosses his arms and looks up and down the street. After a moment, he turns back to me.

“There might be some trucks or something up at the factory.”

“Wait, like semi-trucks or pickup trucks?”

He laughs softly. “Maybe both? Not sure. You don’t know how to drive a semi?”

I glare at him and pull off my cigarette again before dropping it and grinding it out. The look on my face just makes him laugh more. Good. I press the book against his chest, not really wanting to hold it anymore, and he takes it off my hands. “Don’t you?”

“Alright, alright,” he says, tucking the book under his arm as he turns up the street. “The factory’s this way.”

We walk quietly in the darkness, grateful for every street light we pass, but the air is still tight and tense around us. There aren’t any people, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. I can feel eyes on me, maybe from the broken windows around us, and that’s more than enough to shut me up. Marco clearly feels the same. He’s hugging the book to his chest now, looking uncomfortable, and keeping his eyes trained directly in front of him.

We turn up another street, and as we do so, an eerily loud sound pierces the fog and freezes us in our tracks. Marco doesn’t look behind us, just giving me a terrified side-eye. It’s the sound of a door opening slowly, creakily, every cheesy horror movie combined. That kind of sound. I roll my eyes, having heard it a million times, and turn around.

It’s the house next to us, the one we’d just rounded, and a head of shaggy blonde hair pokes out. Blue eyes peer at us from around the door.

I stare at it. It stares at us. I light another cigarette. It senses my mood and steps onto the porch.

“Hi,” I say, looking up at the little boy. Being on the porch puts his tiny face a foot or so above mine. Marco’s still behind me, probably looking nervous. I run my hand through my hair.

The little boy looks at me, then laughs. “You’re dumb,” he says, and already I’m ready to go. I flip him the bird and go to walk away from him. “Do you know why?”

I stare at him over my shoulder, sneering, and try really hard not to fall for it.

But I can’t. Dammit. “Why?”

“Because you fell for it.”

Aw fuck.

He shudders out of existence, laughing to himself, and behind him I can see a trickle of that black shit oozing, dripping out from the cracks in the white siding of the house. I need to get better at sensing distractions.

Cursing loudly, I grab Marco and start running. He catches himself fairly quickly and keeps up with me as we sprint down the sidewalk. Following his directions, we run straight, right, straight again, and a chain-link fence finally looms up out of the fog at the end of a long, cracked road. I skid to a stop, then start running along it, looking for a gate. 

“Over here!”

I turn back to Marco, who’s passing through a peeled-back hole in the fence, and run in his direction. As I duck into the hole, we turn toward the factory and jog across the yard.

The building that looms up out of the mist has pretty much the same vague shape as a factory, but with one major difference. There’s a huge hole cut out of it. I stop and backtrack a few steps, staring up at its hazy outline. The lights attached to the gargantuan silos lined up in front of the building still work, shining absurdly bright through the mist. There’s a strange smell in the air.

I turn to look at Marco, and his expression once again catches me off-guard. He looks horrified, his eyes wide, his jaw slack, hands loose at his side. He drops the book. As I turn to him fully, I notice the chunks of stone littering the yard, bricks sticking up out of the ground, chunks of metal.

“H-hey, Marco,” I begin, glancing around us. “What kind of factory was this again?”

He looks at me, licking his lips, and says quietly, “Flour.”

Something clicks in my mind. Five or six years ago, I’d heard about some kind of factory exploding a few hours outside of Trost. The factory had been the town’s livelihood. Once it went up, everyone there had to leave, already too broke to even think about rebuilding the factory. A thousand residents in this town and just about all the able adults worked in the one factory.

I’d never heard mention of the place turning into an actual ghost town, for fuck’s sake. I haven’t thought about this place in years. If you ask me, this whole thing looks a little too sudden to just be a poverty-induced exodus. 

I know better than to ask, but I can’t resist it. “When was the last time you talked to your parents?” He looks at me again, ripping his gaze from the gaping hole in the building, and that crushing despair passes over his face again. I can’t look at that. I lean down instead and grab the book, dirt stuck to the tar on the cover. “Let’s find a car,” I mumble as I head along the side of the factory, dragging him by his sleeve. 

We jog around the huge, burned-out building, our steps crunching loudly on glass and rubble as we move. The persistent threat of those flaming bog monsters lingers heavy on my mind. 

There are delivery trucks parked behind the factory, most of them with rubble jutting out of the windshields and the hoods and the roofs, each bearing the faded “Jinae Flour Co.” logo on the side. I haven’t let go of Marco’s sleeve yet, and he can’t tear his eyes away from the gutted factory. We move through the truck yard, me searching for a usable vehicle, him probably searching for God, and the silence around us presses in heavy. 

Finally, a row of pickup trucks looms out of the fog, and I make a low, triumphant sound. One of them has some kind of thick rebar through it, nailing it to the ground. The next one has a huge chunk of brick wall crushing the hood inward. I feel ridiculous, like Goldilocks or some shit.

The least damaged of the small fleet has a huge chunk missing from the wall of the bed, but the underside and cab seem mostly intact. I try the door. Locked, of course.

“Hey, Marco,” I murmur as I turn to him, and he startles a little. “Seen any screwdrivers?”

He shakes his head. I sigh.

I want a cigarette really bad, but there’s a very good reason to not light up right now. Flour dust? Yeah, that shit fills the air in these factories. That’s why this one is currently missing a good piece or seven. It’s immensely explosive and almost impossible to see, and I don’t know how long it takes to settle, but a hundred years could have passed and I wouldn’t chance it. 

Sighing, I reach down and grab a brick. I hold the book out to him again, and when he takes it with a questioning look, I turn and put the brick through the window of the truck. The glass shatters insanely loud, and after the sound settles, I’m still frozen, listening hard for the sound of fire.

Nothing.

I exhale slowly and drop the brick before reaching up and into the truck, unlocking the door. I’d really hoped that the keys would be in the cab, but my luck’s not doing so hot today. Guess I used it all up not dying earlier. Pulling my hoodie sleeve over my fist, I reach in and brush as much of the glass as I can see off the seat. Even through my hoodie, the glass cuts my arm a little. I haul myself into the driver’s seat, noticing Marco skitter around to the other side, and I lean over to unlock the door on his side before closing my own door. 

It’s cold as shit already, and it’s only going to get colder, what with the whole no window thing.

I sniff carefully and lean my forehead against the steering wheel, just resting for a moment. Marco lets me. Or maybe I let him, I’m not really sure anymore. My nose is running, and breathing is uncomfortable through the swelling around the break, so I breathe through my mouth. 

Opening my eyes again, I reach under the steering wheel and feel around until I find the edge of the panel. It makes a huge, loud cracking sound as I dig my fingers under it and rip it off. Marco jolts next to me, holding the dirty book to his chest again, and I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He doesn’t question me, though, just watching.

“Is there anything in the glove compartment?” I lean around as I ask, trailing my cold fingers along the wires that lead toward the engine. They snap as I yank on them, disconnecting them from the ignition. I hear him open the little hatch in the dash, moving stuff around. 

“Um, manuals, papers, some gloves…”

I look over at him. “Gimme the gloves.”

They’re thick worker’s gloves, dirty and old, stained with the nondescript black skids that usually come from having some kind of shipping job. Worn leather pads cover the fingertips. I really hope they’re insulated or something. I slide them over my hands and return to my hotwiring, hoping against hope that the car’s battery somehow isn’t dead.

“Hey, Marco.”

“Yeah?”

I grin at him shakily. “Think you can put in a good word for us here? Don’t think He listens to me much.”

A small smile passes over his pale face. It’s all the response I need. He digs in the glove compartment again, pulling out some napkins. Hopefully for his face. He’s getting a little hard to look at, with the blood and the eye and all that.

I yank the plastic caps off the wires, and thankfully some of the casing comes with them. Should be enough. There are only five, though. I close my eyes and think really hard about hotwiring. One green pair, one blue pair, and one single red wire. Hmm.

“Think it’s the red one?” I jump at Marco’s voice, much closer than I’d thought. He’s leaning over, looking at the wires too. 

“Probably.” I drop the red one and touch the green and blue wires together. The truck gives a faint hum, and the lights in the dash come on for half a second, but that’s about it. I hold the bare ends together and twist them tightly around each other. The power comes on in the car again, the lights helpfully alerting me to the fact that the car is stalled out, and I exhale. At least the battery’s somewhat alive. Enough to start the car, though? Who knows.

“Oh, is that it?”

I laugh at him and push at his chest a little. He leans back, blinking at me. Holding the joined wires far from the twist, I pick up the red wire again and take a deep breath. Please, battery, please.

They wires spark when I brush them together rapidly, like a flint and steel. I scoot back a little in the seat and lean back as far as I can. The car doesn’t start, but the engine turns over grumpily. I repeat the motion, a little slower, and the sparks crackle furiously, some landing on my hands. I’m grateful for the gloves. 

Once, twice more and the engine catches. I drop the wires and lean back, then grin at Marco. “Like that?”

He covers his mouth, but I can still see the smile behind his fingers. Dammit. I reach up to the big crank-like handle behind the steering wheel and shove it into drive, testing the gas. The snow here is thinner than back home, so when I flick on the wipers, the powdery mess falls away easily. The truck lurches, tires crunching over gravel, and then we’re finally on our way out of this shithole. 

“Okay, how do I get back to the freeway?” I glance over at him, but he’s looking at the factory again. I lean over, peeking out of his window, and immediately understand why.

Something’s unfolding out of it.

Something big.

I’m not staying to find out what. I jam my foot onto the gas and steer out of the truck lot. I don’t know where the gate is. Better make one. 

Good thing older pickup trucks can handle chain-link.

The metal splits from its support with a screech and I skid out onto the snow flat surrounding the factory, spinning the wheel and aiming for vaguely where I remember the road to be. Fuck that giant, fuck this factory, fuck this whole damn town. Snow flies up around the tires as the truck accelerates, and I burst out onto the road again in some semblance of the right direction.

Marco’s kneeling on his seat, hands gripping the cheap upholstery with white knuckles, staring out the back window at the factory. “Jean, what’s—”

“Don’t know, don’t care, where’s the freeway?”

“ _Jean—_ ”

I ignore him, eyes flicking to my rearview mirror. Whatever it is, it’s huge and slow, its silhouette disappearing as we roar up the road. I try to remember the path we’d taken, but there had been so many unexpected stops, I don’t even think I could retrace it if I tried. At least the fog seems to be lifting. I can see a whole two blocks in front of me now, like that matters when I’m driving something like ninety miles an hour.

“Marco, please put your fucking seat belt on,” I grit out between my grinding teeth, taking an incredibly dangerous right at the first stoplight I see. He obeys, flopping down in his seat, face white. 

We rip past broken row homes, and I slow down, remembering the crash. My head clears a little when I hear his seatbelt click shut. 

“Oh, left,” he stammers, fingers gripping the edge of his seat. I whip around the corner, breath short, cold air starting to sting my face. One of the streets we fly past is bright orange, smoke still curling up toward the sky. Guess we found the other car. 

“Right,” and I turn right, recognizing where we are after we pass the library. Shockingly, it isn’t in flames. If I cared to stop, I’d remedy that, but I have everything I need in the car, and I’m not risking losing it again.

I try not to think about that. I strike the ‘again’ from that thought, forcing myself to focus on the job as the road turns back into the highway. Marco sighs with relief and sinks down into his seat, raking his fingers through his hair. 

“Is this how you live?”

I blink, pursing my lips and considering. In some ways, yeah, it is. That shit in the library, though… never seen that before. And I’ve see a fair few things in my time. I shiver, pulling my hoodie sleeves over the edges of the gloves. Marco’s got his hands tucked deep into his hoodie pockets, and I really hope that’s enough for him.

We drive in silence for a while, breaking the speed limit by a good amount, and I manage to get us back on the eastbound interstate without killing us.

“Jean,” Marco says after a while, breaking the silence.

“Yeah?”

“… Thanks.”

I glance at him, then back to the road. The fog is all but gone now, just a few snaking tendrils creeping over the pavement. “For what?”

“Coming for me. You said I ran off, right?”

“Yeah,” I sigh, scratching the back of my head. The motion is ineffective with the gloves on. A sign alerts me to an upcoming rest stop, with food and gas and that means coffee and cigarettes. Sustenance. I switch lanes, slowing to something approximating the speed limit in anticipation.

He picks at his nails. “Did I take the book with me?”

“Nope. Left it in the car.”

I can feel his eyes boring into the side of my head. I make a show of pulling into the rest stop, its bright lights beckoning us closer. As I pull up to a pump, I stop to think. Can’t really turn off the car. I creep past the pump and instead pull into a parking spot in front of the shop.

The gas meter reads half a tank, and I really really hope that’s enough to get us home. I hop out and move around back.

The bed of the truck is empty but for a big, half-full gas can. I slosh the gasoline inside a little, then wedge the thing back where it was. That’ll have to do. Walking around to Marco’s side, I knock on his window, and he rolls it down. It’s one of those windows where you have to actually crank the glass down. I snicker.

“I’m going in. Need anything?”

He shakes his head. I peel the gloves off and toss them at him. “Don’t get stolen.” I turn and try to look casual as I stroll into the mostly-empty mart, but the cashier is already staring.

Broken nose, blood everywhere, dirty, smelly… yeah, I probably look like shit. Oops.

I grab a few cans of that Monster shit, since it’s probably easier to carry than coffee. Beef jerky, duct tape, baby wipes, bandaids… nice and suspicious.

“And a pack of Marlboro menthols,” I grunt at the cashier as she nervously scans my purchase. I can see her eyes flicking between me and the truck outside. She obliges, reads me my total, and I hand her a wad of crumpled, warm cash from the depths of my pockets. “Keep the change. Oh, can I have a few extra bags?”

She stares at me. I try to look innocent, but my face kind of fucks that up. She hands me a wad of plastic bags. I smile and leave.

I open the door of the truck and hand Marco the bag of stuff after fishing out the duct tape. He raises his eyebrows at me, but doesn’t question me when I take the extra bags and close my door again. I do the best I can to cover the broken window with a layer of bags and duct tape. It ain’t pretty, but it’ll have to do. Sliding back into the car, I throw it in reverse and back out of the parking spot.

When we hit the freeway again, the air is much less cold, but the sound of the bags ruffling is kind of annoying. 

“Can you pass me my cigarettes?”

Marco digs in the bag and unwraps the cigarettes, popping them open and pulling one out of the wrapping. I look at him, eyebrows raised, and my mouth opens a little when he sticks it between his own lips.

“Smoking now, Padre?”

He procures an ancient Zippo from the glove compartment, shakily lighting it and holding the flame to the end of the cigarette. He inhales and, as expected, coughs. I laugh and pluck the cigarette out of his mouth. Clicking the lighter shut, he takes a deep swig of his soda. “Not anymore, no. How do you do that so much?”

“You’re telling me you’re 27 and you never had a smoking phase?”

“No,” he mumbles, fingers moving to pick at a thread sticking out of the seat. 

“Don’t sound so guilty. Nothing wrong with that.” I inhale deeply, trying to aim my smoke at the bags, for all the good that does. He subtly rolls his window down an inch or two. “Your clothes probably all smell great.”

He laughs softly. “Not anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah, hanging out with the smelly guy makes you smelly. Rub it in some more, please.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Do me a favor.”

“Mm?”

I point at the bag between his feet on the floor of the truck. “Baby wipes. Please clean your face.”

He blinks. “My face?”

I give him a side-eye. “Have you honestly not looked in any reflective surfaces lately?” He shakes his head. I gesture at the sun flap, and he flips it down, opening the cover to the mirror.

“Oh, uh,” is his response, fingers coming up to tug at his right eyelid. “What’s that?”

“Blood,” I reply shortly, reaching into the console to pull at the ashtray. It pops out, full of change, and I grind out my butt on a nickel. “Happened in the library.”

He opens the baby wipes and rubs one over his face, using like four of the damn things before he looks anything remotely like clean. I see him rubbing at his eyelid, trying to clear the hematoma. 

“How much of the library do you remember?”

Crumpling his bloody wipes back into the bag, he licks his lips. “Not much. I think… was there someone there?”

“A librarian.”

“Yeah, I remember her. I think… she disappeared, and you asked her where the book was, and that’s about it.” He makes a face, then turns to look at me. “What happened?”

Merging over to pass a slow-ass old car in front of us, I sigh. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Why? Was it bad?”

“You didn’t do anything.” I swallow. “Just what you were told.”

“… By who?”

“That’s what I don’t know.” I glance down at the book between us distrustfully. I would say that I trust this thing as far as I can throw it, but it’s a book, so.

Marco reaches over with a fresh wipe and dabs at my face a little. I look at him, giving him a face, and he shrugs. “You’re dirty.”

“And you’re a beauty queen,” I grumble, wringing a chuckle out of him. I let him clean the blood off my face, though, and whatever the hell else is there. He goes easy on my busted nose, thankfully, when he puts a bandaid over the cut across it. 

“Hey, Jean,” he murmurs, wiping dirt off my forehead. I lean into the cool, pleasant-smelling touch.

“Mm.”

“I, uh… I don’t think I’ve been entirely honest with you.”

It literally takes all of my being to not scream, _‘No fucking shit, genius!’_ and various other obscenities. I bite my tongue instead, glancing at him. 

“I haven’t seen my parents since I was sixteen.”

I relax into my seat, shivering a little, and Marco leans back over to his, having apparently done a satisfactory job cleaning me up. “Why’s that?”

“They think I’m dead.”

Huh. My eyebrows shoot up into my hair. “And why’s that?”

He pauses, chewing his lip. Picking his nails again, he mumbles, “Because that’s how they found me.”

I remember the police tape, the blood in the tub, the line in the church about the cars’ shadows, and my stomach drops straight down. Possibly through the floor of the truck. I light another cigarette and wait for him to continue.

It takes a while. He stares at his shaking, cold hands. I watch him carefully, sucking deeply on my cigarette.

Eventually he turns toward me in his seat and reaches his hands toward me. I spare a look down at his wrists, noticing then the wide, pale scars stretching over his veins. 

Unable to respond, I settle for pulling off one of my gloves and reaching down to twine my fingers with his. He squeezes my hand. His fingers are cold. 

“You don’t have to tell me anything else,” I manage, finding my voice somewhere. I chance a look at him, but his eyes are on our hands.

“Okay.”

I think for a moment. “Wait, one more thing.” He looks up at me. “Could you see them before?”

He swallows, hand trembling a little. “Yes,” he says finally, voice cracking. He takes a swig of his drink. His other fingers are still resting between mine on the center console. “But they never bothered the congregation, so I tried to ignore it.”

I raise my eyebrows again, merging over without a turn signal. The guy behind me honks. “You ignored it?”

“Yeah.”

“Until they ate the food drive donations.”

“Mhm.”

I turn to look at him. “Marco Bodt, you are seriously either the dumbest or most selfless person I have ever met.”

He smiles. “Please look at the road.”

“Must be the latter.” I oblige him, squeezing his hand, hoping that he doesn’t notice the flush spreading across my cheeks. I almost miss the fine coating of grunge. It would’ve hidden my stupid face.

We ride in silence for a while, fingers twined, and it’s honestly comfortable. That worries me a little. I’ll allow myself this moment of peace, though. Just for the duration of the car ride.

“Where are we headed? Target?”

“Hell no,” I say, slowing down as I leave the freeway. “You’re going to the hospital.”

“What, no, why?”

“Dude, seriously? You blew an eyeball. I’m taking you to make sure your brain’s not filling up with blood.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Can I talk you out of it?”

“Nope.”

I take my hand back, squeezing his again before I do so, and steer the car toward the hospital. I end up leaving it in an alley behind an Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the hospital. He helps me clean out as much of our presence as we can, but I doubt either of us are in the system. Well, I’m not, anyway.

We trudge through the crunchy, frozen sludge toward the hospital, and as we move, I pull my phone out of my pocket. Annie’s name is about at the top of my short list of contacts.

Her phone rings twice before she picks up, sounding like her usual cheery self.

“What.”

“Hey, Annie,” I say smoothly, stepping over a big pile of snow. “You remember how you owe me that favor?”

She’s silent. I assume this means yes. 

“Well, I don’t really want to be sitting in the ER for twelve hours, and I have a friend who needs to get checked out. Are you at the hospital?”

Silence again. God, this chick makes me nervous. Marco finishes his drink and shoves it in an overstuffed trashcan.

“Okay, well, meet you at the ER doors in like five minutes.”

I hang up, not giving her a chance to respond, if she’s even going to. I know there’s only so much she can do as a resident, but I’m hoping she can at least check Marco over. I turn to the priest, who’s looking at me with trepidation. He peers at me and asks, “Do we have to?”

“Yes,” I reply firmly, turning back to the hospital. I creep into the ambulance bay, trying to look not-suspicious, and lean against the wall by the doors. Marco follows, resigned to his fate, and I offer him a sunny grin.

“You look like shit,” comes the deadpan from something like shoulder-height. I look down at the cranky blonde, who looks like she hasn’t slept in days. About average, then. 

“Thanks,” I grumble, turning to her. I resist the urge to lean down. Best to not irritate her. “Can you—”

She interrupts me. By reaching up and grabbing my nose. The broken one. I yelp, flailing a little, and when she yanks on it, I swear the ‘crack’ echoes through my skull. I see stars. Wow, that sucks. I grasp her wrist, trying not to scream, and choke on a whimper. She’s still holding, still squeezing, and I dig my nails into her thin wrist on impulse.

After what feels like a lifetime, she lets me go, and I sink to my knees. “Keep ice on that,” she says, and I find it in me to not puke on her shoes.

“I didn’t mean me,” I say tremulously. 

“Oh.”

I point wordlessly up at Marco, still holding my face, and I watch her shoes pace over to him. A scuffle as Marco scoots away from her, soft mumbling, and _god almighty_ does my face hurt. I lean down and press my forehead to the cold ground.

“Are you coming in?”

I turn my head to glare up at her. She’s pushing a panicked-looking Marco through the bay doors with a hand fisted in the back of his collar. Nodding, I groan and stumble to my feet, following them in.

“You could’ve warned me.” I cup my hands over my face, the chill in my fingers helping just a little with the pain.

“You would have anticipated it.”

“How are you actually a doctor?”

“I’m a surgeon.”

“Dude, surgeons are still doctors. Where’s your bedside manner?”

She turns toward me and I flinch. Midget or not, the woman is _terrifying_. “I left it in the OR after twelve straight hours elbow-deep in some guy’s abdomen.”

“O-oh.”

She steers Marco down a hallway, toward what I assume is radiology, and I elect to sit on a bench. He looks back at me, eyes wide. “You’re not coming in?”

I grin at him. “I can’t go near MRIs. Have fun, champ!”

He sputters, confused, and Annie just powers along. He’s in good hands, I figure. Cold, and very violent, but good. I relax, face still pounding, and pull out my phone. As I’m scrolling through my contacts again, I notice a pair of sneakers have come to a stop in front of me. I look up, up, forever up, until my eyes land on Bertholdt’s familiar face.

“Hey,” I say, standing up and moving to shake his hand. 

“You look terrible,” he murmurs, stuffing his hands back into his pockets after giving me a damp, floppy shake. Like a dead fish.

“Why does everyone suddenly have commentary on my appearance?”

“Do you want an ice pack?”

My attitude towards Bert changes drastically at that. “Yes, please.” 

He nods and turns, walking down the hall. I follow, keeping pace with him, and stuff my phone back into my pocket. “Why’d they let you out of the fridge?”

He glances at me. Bert’s an actual mortician here at the hospital, and if not for the fact that I spend months at a time ripping through corpses with medical students, I’d be afraid that he’d catch me in one of my many lies about what I do. ‘The fridge’ is my cute nickname for the morgue.

“I was with Annie when you called her.” He moves behind the desk at a nurse station, and mumbles something at one of the nurses, who looks at me and nods. She procures an ice pack from a small fridge under the desk and hands it to me, and I thank her warmly.

“Bert!” I recognize that boisterous noise, turning toward Reiner as he bounds up the hall. I push the cool, squishy pack against my face and sigh contently. After he’s done jostling Bert, Reiner turns to me. “Wow, you look like ass. Getting into fights with corpses?”

I glare at him over the ice pack. Seriously, all three of them? “At least I’m not wearing scrubs with teddy bears on them.”

Reiner puffs his (pink-bear-covered) chest out and gives me a huge grin. “Fuck you very much, sir, I just got done covering for someone up in pediatrics.”

“You borrow their scrubs, too?”

“Jealousy is a stinky cologne, Jean,” he says. He turns back to Bert and pokes him in the belly. Bert makes an ‘eep’ sound and moves quickly out of the nurse’s station, putting a counter between himself and his grabby friend. “Seriously, though, what happened?”

I pause and think. “Bar fight.”

“Classy.”

Rolling my eyes, I shoot Bert a thank-you and head back the way we came, intent on my bench. With all of them here, it’s not really safe to call Levi now. I send him a text instead, letting him know that we have the book (which is tucked safely into the back of my pants), we’re back in Trost, and he can come over later to talk shit over.

Marco’s checkup takes _forever_. I run out of Facebook quickly, and I only get through three levels of Angry Birds before my phone gives up and dies. I guess it has been a pretty long day.

I turn the ice pack over and press it back against my face, leaning my head back against the wall. The book digs into my back and sticks a little, getting grit all on my butt cheeks, but I don’t dare pull it out. Let Levi take care of that shit. I’m not even happy having it touch my skin, let alone spinning its tales into my brain.

When Marco finally appears at the end of the hallway, my ice pack is half melted, and I’m realizing how sore and exhausted I am. He ambles toward me.

“Where’s Annie?”

“She said she’s going home, and that nothing’s wrong with me.” 

Lowering the ice pack, I squint at him. He flushes a little, but doesn’t break eye contact. “Fine,” I mumble, and I turn back down the hallway leading to the nurse station. Marco trails along behind me, uneven footsteps sounding as exhausted as mine. I hand the ice pack back to the nurse, thanking her, and look around. No Bert, no Annie, no Reiner. Oh well. 

“You ready to go?” I stuff my hands in my pockets as I ask, and he nods vigorously. He seems to regret the motion, though, hands coming up to rub at his temples. “Head still hurt?” His nod this time is less enthused. I turn the way we came and head down the hall, shoes squeaking.

I splurge a little and buy us a cab back to my apartment. The guy isn’t pleased to be going so far off his route, but the look I give him from the backseat is enough to quash any shit he tries to give us. 

When I finally close the door behind us, I rip the book out of my ass and toss it onto the stove. Probably not smart, but whatever. It’s between the burners. I flop onto my back on the couch, boots hanging off the end, and close my eyes.

Marco comes over, holding the book gingerly, and as he places it on the coffee table he sits next to my legs. I swing one over his head and onto the floor, spreading out to allow him more room on the couch, which he takes graciously.

I light another cigarette, noticing through the smoke that he’s watching me. I’m suddenly very conscious of him between my legs. Far too lazy to move, I just blush and stare at him. “What?”

“Why can’t you go near MRIs?”

Grinning again, I tuck my cigarette between my teeth and unzip my hoodie. His eyes widen, and he scoots further toward the end of the couch, like I’m going to bite him or something. Instead, I hike my t-shirt up, showing him the metal barbells through my nipples.

I’ve never seen someone’s face turn quite that shade of red, but it’s pretty impressive. I let him have a good look before I tug my shirt back most of the way over my stomach, pulling my cigarette away to tap the ashes into the ashtray next to me on the floor. He turns to stare at the floor, face aflame. I swear, the color’s competing strongly with the blood in his eye.

Usually the question I get next is something like, ‘why did you do that?’ or ‘did that hurt?’ or some other variation of those. Marco, though, just stares at the floor for a while. I revel in his embarrassment. Just a little.

“Go take a shower,” I say after a while, grinding out my cigarette, and he nods jerkily. He kind of trips into the bathroom, and I let myself laugh at him as I hear him turn on the water. I wait until it sounds like he’s gotten in to get up and grab a change of clothes for him. 

“You forgot clothes,” I holler, knocking on the door before opening it. He eeps behind the curtain, a stream of sputters coming out, but I just yell over him. “I can’t see you, I can’t see you, Jesus. I’ll leave them on the toilet.” I ignore his stream of noises and grab his dirty clothes, turning a healthy shade of red myself before I leave. 

Whatever, dude. He’s hot for a priest. Wanting to peek on him is totally natural.

I close the door behind myself and move to stuff his dirty clothes into my somewhat overflowing hamper. Gonna need to hit up the Laundromat sometime soon. I would use the facilities in the basement, but the Junjudee down there tend to steal my good pants. And my forks. Assholes.

By the time we’ve both showered, and I’ve calmed my hormones a little (thanks to the shower running frozen about ten minutes in), Levi’s knocking at my door. I open up, toweling my hair dry. He storms past me wordlessly. I’m going shirtless just for convenience, not to tease Marco, definitely. The cold is perking my pierced nipples right up, but it’s also fucking _cold_ , so I give up shortly and tug a shirt on.

Levi takes over my small couch, stealing one of my cigarettes as he does so. I don’t say anything about that. He looks at me as he lights it, then at Marco, then at the book on my coffee table. I continue toweling my hair dry. 

He looks back up at me and exhales a ton of smoke. “I guess it went poorly.”

I snort. “You could say that.”

I drape my towel around my neck and move to the fridge, pulling out one of the cans of Coke I’d gotten the other day. Yesterday? Holy shit. What an action-packed two days. Let’s not do it again.

When I move back toward the couch, Levi reaches up and steals my towel, dropping it over the book. He wraps it up, careful not to touch it, and puffs out a disdainful cloud of smoke in its direction.

I open my soda. The silence is heavy for a second. Then Levi pins me with a look. “Tell me everything.”

So I do.


	5. The Calm Before the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it's okay to let go and forget for a while, but when I'm not distracted by work, my mind goes other places.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm going to keep adding on to jean's body mods until one of you stops me
> 
> spoiler alert: no one can stop me
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

Marco lets me tell the story. To be fair, there’s not much he can add. Levi prods him, asking him questions, but all he can remember is a blinding headache. He’d been in Germany when the factory went up, too, so of course he hadn’t heard about it. I try to ignore the flicker of sadness that passes over his face again.

Leaning back, arms spread over the back of the couch, Levi sighs irritably. He steals another cigarette. Marco fiddles with his fingers in his lap.

“I’ll take that,” Levi says after a while, pointing at the book. We all stare down at it, the obvious elephant in the room.

“What are you gonna do with it?” I turn to Levi as I ask, really hoping that his answer involves either burying it or lighting it on fire.

“I know someone who’s real interested in what’s in there.”

“Yeah?”

Levi nods. He stands then, grabbing the book and shoving it in his bag. As he steps over me to leave, I sigh again.

“Hey, Levi.” He turns to me, eyebrow raised. I meet his stare. “I want a vacation.”

He snorts humorlessly.

“No, seriously,” I continue, standing to throw my soda can into the recycling by the counter. “When was the last time I asked for time off?”

We stare each other down, and just as I’m about to give in, he sighs through his nose. “Fine. A week. But if something comes up—”

“No way.” I cross my arms, trying my best to use my height to my advantage. Like that ever works. “If I see your ass, I’m running like hell in the other direction. Let us be for a week, then I’ll do whatever.”

Nodding, Levi turns and leaves my apartment. He thinks he’s slick, but I catch a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. When the door slams shut behind him, I fall backwards onto the couch, my head landing in Marco’s lap. He makes some kind of squeaky noise, but doesn’t dislodge me. 

“Well, we have a week to do whatever,” I say, reaching up to poke at his freckles. He lets me walk two fingers across his face, laughing at my soft touches.

We sit in silence for a while, my eyes drifting comfortably closed. I can hear his easy breathing, smooth and even under my raggedy breaths. Stupid nose.

“Can I keep staying here?” I open one eye to peek at him, but he’s conspicuously facing away from me. I reach up and flick his chin gently. The motion startles him a little.

“Duh. Your house has a nasty case of the bogeys, man.” He laughs, and I grin up at him before sitting up and reaching for my plugged-in phone. “What kind of pizza do you like?”

“Whatever, I’m not picky.” 

Of course. Freckled Jesus. I try to be subtle about the fact that Big Joe’s Pizza is like number two on my speed dial, but he’s not paying attention anyway. He’s just picking idly at a thread on his pants. I lean back against the arm of the couch and stretch my legs obnoxiously over his lap.

“Big Joe’s,” comes my landlord’s raspy voice in my ear, the loud sounds of a pizza kitchen in the background. Yeah, the same Big Joe that owns my apartment and the corner store owns like six pizza restaurants too, all some sequel to another. Seriously. Big Joe’s, Big Joe’s II, Big Joe’s the 8th, King of England… what he lacks in creativity he makes up for in a keen eye for questionable real estate.

“’Ey, Joe,” I slur into the phone, running a hand through my fluffy hair.

“’Ey, _guapo_. The usual?”

“Thanks, man.”

“ _De nada_. Ten even.”

“ _Gracias_.” I hang up the phone and drop it back on the floor, under the outlet that’s charging it. Marco’s watching me again, clearly amused.

“Where did you learn Spanish?”

I shrug, wishing that every hoodie I own wasn’t covered in something awful. It’s still a little cold in here. Definitely need to do laundry sometime in the next day or so. “Took it in high school, picked it up again living around here. Lots of Spanish people.” I cross my ankles over his lap. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Any useful languages?”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully. “Mm, I can understand a little Spanish, but not much… I still remember some French and German from studying over there. Oh, some of the kids at the church have been teaching me Mandarin.”

“Oh yeah?”

He smiles. “Yep. The church is in a big Chinese community, so they help me out a little when I’m talking to the first generation members.” 

I lace my fingers behind my head and think for a while. God, what day is it, even? Monday? “Does the church open during the week?”

He ponders for a minute. “Sometimes, for events and stuff. I don’t think there’s anything this week, though.” Sighing, he scratches the back of his head. “I wonder what I’m gonna do about service on Sunday…”

A knock comes at the door after a few more minutes and I swing my legs over the coffee table, tripping toward the door. I grab my wallet off the counter as I go, digging out a crumpled ten and a five.

“Ey, _guapo_ ,” the short little delivery dude says to me when I open the door. He holds out the pizza, which I take somewhat reverently, pushing the cash into his chilly fingers. 

“ _Manny, Joe got you callin’ me that too now?_ ”

He shrugs, pocketing the cash. Looking over my shoulder, he peers at Marco, then at me. “ _New boyfriend?_ ”

“ _Oh my god go away._ ” I turn to put the pizza on the counter, leaving the door open. I like Manny. He’s pretty cool, as far as hella nosy little punks go. Pretty sure he’s under legal working age, but if that’s the least of Big Joe’s illegal activities, I’d be genuinely surprised. “ _Why do you all care so much?_ ”

“ _You need to settle down, man._ ” I stare at him, coming back to the door. “ _You work all the time, it’s bad for your health._ ”

“ _Manny, when was your last day off?_ ”

He stares at me, nonplussed. I’m pretty sure it was over a year ago. Crossing his arms, he replies, “ _I’m supporting my family. What about you?_ ”

“ _Supporting your boss. Adios, osito._ ”

He rolls his eyes but waves, turning to jog down my stairs. I really hope he’s not still doing deliveries on his bike. If I hadn’t abandoned the truck, I’d try to take it to one of Big Joe’s auto shops to see about getting it rewired and vaguely legal for the kid. Oh yeah, he does chop shops too. Big Joe may actually own the entirety of the Spanish quarter, I’m not sure. I close the door.

Marco’s already cramming a slice of meat-covered pizza into his face. I guess he’d been hungry. Watching him, I’m suddenly reminded of the fact that I’d barely eaten in two days, and I understand his voracity.

We stand in my kitchen and attempt conversation around huge mouthfuls of sausage. Wait. No, you know what, I’m just gonna leave that alone.

Marco swallows and asks, “So you know everyone around here?”

I give him a muffled assent, managing a thick, “More or less.”

“Do any of them know?” He takes another monstrous bite. I shake my head.

“I try to keep it that way.”

He hums, and silence falls between us again. I pick up the pizza and carry it over to the coffee table, spreading out on the couch again. Marco trails along behind me.

We manage to kill the whole pizza between us, although it’s a pretty serious feat. The pizza that Joe gives me for ten bucks normally costs double that and could probably feed a small country. I think he’s starting to catch onto the fact that I’m acting as a subtle exterminator of some kind, though, because he’s been giving me breaks on food and rent lately. Not that I’m complaining.

I slouch down against the arm of the couch, hand resting on my belly, about ready to pass out. Marco pokes me in the knee, looking no less sleepy. “Your turn on the bed tonight.”

Groaning, I roll and bury my face in the back of the couch. “I’m comfy. You take it.”

“Aw, Jean, come on—”

“Don’t wanna move.” I push at his butt with my foot. “Go on.”

“Can you at least take the warm blanket? That one’s really thin.”

“No. It smells.” It doesn’t. I’m trying to deflect his politeness.

I can feel his stare drilling holes in the side of my head. It takes a lot of self-control to not giggle. 

“Jean,” he whines, and I turn to peer up at him. “You said we’d switch.” He twiddles his fingers. “I feel bad.”

I wave a hand at him dismissingly. Honestly, I spent an incredible amount of time passed out in many places in this apartment that weren’t the bed even before he got here, depending upon my state of being whenever I get home from a job. Sleeping on the couch is no bigs.

He’s silent. I can _hear_ the pouting.

“What if we share it?”

I turn to look at him again. He’s blushing a little, still pouting. I raise an eyebrow.

The bed’s more than big enough, but I’m a sleep cuddler, and I’ll be damned if I ever let him figure that out. He’d probably run away screaming, too, because sleep cuddling generally leads to sleep wood, and I don’t think he wants my dick anywhere near him.

“Dude, just go to sleep,” I sigh, tugging the blanket over myself from where it somehow got buried between the cushions.

He stays still for a while. I’m about to just pass out whether he’s in bed or not when he stands and moves behind me. I roll onto my back, about to give him some vague threat, when he reaches under me and physically fucking _lifts me off the couch_. I stare up at him, struggling and sputtering loudly, and he just turns and dumps me on the bed with a self-satisfied smile.

I have to hide my rock-hard boner under the thin blanket piled conspicuously in my lap. Can’t say I’ve ever been manhandled before. Not by a living person, at least. Apparently it’s awesome. 

I’d thought that he was going to lay down on the couch. Instead, he comes and climbs up between me and the wall from the foot of the bed, collapsing face-first into the pillow there.

Oh, please stay like that. Just give me a few minutes. Grandmas. Haunted grandmas. Haunted leprosy grandmas. That scene from _Mirrors_ where Amy Smart rips her jaw off. There, that’s working.

I reach over, hand shaking a little, and turn off the light, curling into a ball under my blanket as far away as I can get. That took me completely by surprise. I’m wondering what the fuck is up with my hormones tonight.

Watch a guy almost die once, suddenly you’re just a little too close, I guess. Super.

He lets out a soft snore then, face still half-buried in the pillow, not even covered by the blankets. I wonder what it’s like to be able to fall asleep, just like that. I’ve always kind of had insomnia.

I curse softly and roll out of bed, grabbing my phone and smokes before locking myself in the bathroom.

After lighting a soothing cigarette, I flip through the internet on my phone, trying to find something to calm myself down. The hard-on may have faded, but the tight feeling in my gut isn’t leaving, and I need something honestly distracting if I’m gonna be able to sleep.

Sitting on the edge of the tub, I wait for reddit to load, willing myself to go to creepypasta and not any of my honestly more-frequented subs. Unfortunately, it’s a slow night, and I’ve already read all the little horror vignettes that are posted. I sigh, taking a good drag off my cigarette, and give in to the urge. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Holding my cigarette between my lips, I wriggle my loose pants down over my thighs, shifting so that I’m sitting in the tub with my legs hanging up over the rim. My dick’s already half at attention. Resting my phone on my knee, I reach down to play with the little silver ball resting in the slit, tugging gently on the piercing. I laugh and inhale deeply, breathing out the smoke slowly. If Marco flipped out about nipple piercings, I wonder how he’d feel about this one. 

Getting a Prince Albert was probably one of my better life choices. I run my finger over the other ball resting just below the head. My cock stands up a little straighter, obviously grateful for the attention.

I don’t have enough hands. I just leave my cigarette in my mouth for now, picking my phone back up and navigating over to gonewild. Amateur, anonymous internet titties. My favorite. My other hand curls around the head of my dick, squeezing gently, before I pull away to drag the tips of my fingers slowly up the hardening arch of my length. I can’t help the little shiver the movement elicits.

Scrolling through endless pictures of cute little shaved pussies, supple breasts spilling out of bras, arched spines pushing fine asses up into the air at me, I squint at my phone, stroking myself with a quick, loose grip. As much as I deserve a crazy buildup, I just want to get this out of my system and go the fuck to sleep. I tighten my grip a little, flicking through a crazy good photoset called ‘[f]irst time, be gentle.’

I turn and spit my cigarette out in the direction of the drain, ignoring the ashes that drop onto my shirt for now. My grip tightens, thumb spreading slick precome around the jewelry in my slit, my mouth dropping open a little at the sensation. The photoset ends with the tiny ginger chewing on her knuckle, legs spread coyly, and I give a muffled groan, quickly biting my lip around it.

I hit the back button and scroll down again, and when my eye catches the incredibly rare ‘[m]’ in the title of a photoset, I bite my lip harder and tap the link. Guys almost never post on here, but when they do, it’s usually a good time.

The guy doesn’t show his face, but the way he arches his ass out at the camera makes my mouth dry. I stroke a little faster, slouching down and rolling my hips up slightly into my hand. He’s on his back in the next photo, his pretty, flushed dick arching up toward the ceiling, one hand splayed on his tight stomach. The next photo he’s raking his nails up his inner thighs, and god bless the camera that picks up the faint red lines his fingers leave in his perfect, tanned thighs. I shiver. Nails always get me.

I scroll further, hips moving into my hand more insistently as I go, and when I hit the photo of him, his back arched, two fingers buried deep in his ass, precome trailing down his aching cock, I can’t help the stuttering moan that flits through my lips. I squeeze my eyes shut on that image and he comes to life in my mind, moaning so sweetly on my bed, his fingers thrusting hard right into his sweet spot. I tilt my head back against the wall with a ‘thunk,’ not even noticing the pain, and fuck my hips up into my hand like I’m thrusting deep into his tight ass. 

Licking my lips, I shiver in the tub, toes curling, and I chew on my knuckle, having dropped my phone a little while ago. I pull my finger out of my mouth and move it down my chest slowly until I’m pinching my pierced nipple through my shirt just a little too tight, and ohhh _fuck_. The feeling sends me over the edge, gasping for breath.

I come into my hand and on my shirt, eyes squeezed tightly shut, bucking up and imagining soft thighs around my hips, sweet, begging moans, and darkly-flushed freckles.

Oh god damn it.

Well, whatever, I think hazily as I rub my hand against a clean part of my shirt, smearing come across the fabric. I jacked off to my third grade teacher on accident once, this is probably the same thing.

My brain fuzzy and immensely relaxed, I pull my shirt off and toss it somewhere before reaching for another cigarette. 

The relaxation is almost too much, though, and I find my head nodding hard if I blink for a moment too long. I hurry up and finish my post-self-love cigarette, knocking both butts down the drain and hauling myself heavily out of the tub.

I clean myself up and wash my hands. The black eyes I’ve got are distinctly less than attractive, so I’m probably not going to get any real fun on my little vacation. Not like I can bring someone home with Marco here, and I’m a little too paranoid to leave him here by himself yet. I sigh and leave the bathroom, plugging my phone back in before flopping bonelessly into the bed.

He’s still the way I left him, uncovered, so I drag the big, thick blanket over the both of us with a grunt.

I sleep like a goddamn baby.

\--

The next morning I wake up on my stomach, drooling a little on the pillow. The grey morning air is barely filtering through the window. It must be early still. I realize Marco is wrapped around me like a goddamn starfish. His leg drapes under my ass, holding me against his chest, and his warm arm against my bare back feels a lot more comfortable than I care to admit. I shift and grunt softly, and he worms closer, and that’s when he grinds his _massive_ , insanely hard morning wood against my hip and sighs in his sleep.

Oh please please please be asleep.

I lean up onto my elbows and look down at his face, immensely peaceful, lips parted just a bit, and immediately barrel roll right the fuck out of there.

By the time he wakes up, somewhere around noon, I’ve had seven cups of coffee and jacked off furiously four times. 

Whatever. He’s hot, apparently well-endowed, and staying in my apartment. I refuse to let this become more than a wank fantasy, though, and for good reason. Good fucking reason.

He sits up and yawns widely, pulling the blanket around himself, and I try to school my flushed face into something resembling a casual ‘oh hey.’ I’m sprawled out on the couch, reading whatever magazine got misdelivered to me. I look at him over the pages, and he peers back blearily, rubbing at his bum eye. His hair is standing up something fierce, so I let myself chuckle at him, raising an eyebrow.

“Looking good, sleeping beauty,” I mumble, and he kind of grunts in reply. Definitely not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. I toss the boring-ass magazine onto the coffee table and move into the kitchen, making a big show of putting on the kettle to make him coffee. Thankfully, he takes advantage of my turned back, and I hear him shuffle clumsily into bathroom and trip over the rug as he closes the door. Luckily, I’d remembered to pick my jizz-covered shirt up off the bathroom floor and hide it deep within the laundry.

He comes back out again and leans heavily against the counter next to me. I lean forward and peer at his eye. It’s still stained red, not like I’d expected it to go away overnight. It’ll probably fade out over a few weeks. Rubbing his other eye, Marco mumbles incoherently at me, and I laugh at him.

“You’re really not a morning person, huh.”

“Yesterday was hard,” he grouses, rubbing his hands down his face in an apparent attempt to force consciousness into his skull. 

“Yeah, true. I guess you probably deserve to sleep for a few days.” I turn off the heat under the kettle just as it starts to whistle, flicking the cap up and pouring hot water over the instant coffee in our one mug. I swear, that stuff’s the only thing I go out of my way to keep in stock around here. I stir the cup for a second before handing it to Marco. He accepts it and moves to sit on the couch, crossing his legs under himself.

I dump out of the rest of the water and move to plop down next to him. I’ve never actually wished for a TV before, but I don’t really have anything to keep him occupied. I look over at Marco, who appears to just be staring blankly into the mug.

“So,” I start, running a hand through my hair. He blinks up at me. “We got stuff to do today.”

“Oh?”

“Yep.” I pull out a cigarette and light it, tossing the now-empty pack back onto the coffee table. “Laundry, buy food, and get you a cell phone.” He looks over at me, eyebrows raised. I stare back and blow a light stream of smoke at him.

“Well, I have a phone…”

“Yeah? Where at?”

He scratches the back of his head and drops his gaze sheepishly. “I kind of… dropped it down the stairs to the crypt’s basement.”

I stare at him. “You mean there’s still shit _under_ the crypt too?”

“Yeah. Uh.” He looks at me nervously. “You know. Mausoleums.”

My eyes widen.

“It’s just a few, and they’re little—”

I cut him off, spewing exasperated smoke. “No, Padre, your phone is gone. Caput. Because there are many things I will face to try and save the world, but haunted-ass ancient mausoleums under haunted-ass ancient crypts is not one of those things.”

He smiles, sipping his coffee, and gives me a lopsided shrug. 

Standing up again, I put out my cigarette and start digging around in my drawers for pants. The only ones I can find are too big on me, sagging down around my ass, but I put them on anyway after tossing my sleep pants onto the hamper. I pull out an old-ass band shirt and haul it over my head, once again mourning the lack of hoodies. At least the Laundromat is only across the street.

I turn to Marco, stuffing my hands in my pockets, and he tilts his head. He’s got this massive cowlick sticking up in back. I cross over to him and tug on it, just to be a pain. He swats at my hand and drains his coffee, standing up and hovering over me a little.

Issuing him a challenging stare, I stick my tongue out, and he laughs before he moves away.

“You can keep wearing that stuff,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck. “Your pants look like hell.” He looks down at himself, decked out in a huge shirt (I’m pretty sure I stole it from Reiner in college, because I don’t know anyone else that huge) and grey sweatpants with ‘Trost University’ down one leg. 

“Is it actually acceptable to go out in public like this?”

I shrug and grin. The pants I’m wearing would probably fit him perfectly, but to be honest, I’m having a lot more fun making fun of him. He rolls his eyes and pulls on some socks. As he stuffs his feet back into his old, high-top chucks, I cram mine back into my shoes and pull on a loose flannel. 

The bag of quarters I have stashed in a box on my bookshelf is a little lighter than I remember, but it should still be enough. Marco’s already stuffing the overflowing clothes deep into the hamper and lifting the thing, looking at me expectantly.

I can’t help but laugh as we leave. He looks a hot mess.

“You know, I’ve never seen anyone pull off the sweats-tucked-into-high-tops look before.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

“Including now. Still never seen it.”

“I will pants you.”

I laugh loudly and sprint across the cold street, dodging traffic in a manner best described as reckless, and by the time he catches up to me, I’m already inside the Laundromat, talking to the old lady that runs it. One of the few things Joe doesn’t own. Yet.

She rabbles at me in rapid Spanish about her son’s dogs, and I nod, holding her frail, wrinkled hands in mine. To be honest, she’s talking so fast that I can only understand half of it, but she trails off when Marco marches in and moseys up next to me, setting down the laundry.

“ _Ah, Jean, do you have a new boyfriend?_ ”

I smile widely, keeping the stream of profanity to a roaring internal scream, and take a deep breath. “ _He’s just a friend, abuela. He’s staying with me for a while._ ”

She lets go of my hands and reaches for Marco’s, and he takes her hands in his, shooting me a mildly confused look. She rambles for a little while about how nice of a man he looks to be, and to treat me nicely, and I’m nodding and subtly checking my phone, wondering how much of this I should bother to translate for Marco.

That’s about the point where he opens his mouth and, in perfect, fluid Spanish, says, “ _It was lovely to meet you, Mrs. Rodriguez, but we really need to wash our laundry. Jean’s socks are making me dizzy._ ”

As I’m staring at him, affronted, my jaw hanging open, abuela roars with laughter and hands me detergent. At least one of us is getting a kick out of this. Marco gives me a wide grin, those damn laughter lines cropping up again, and carries our shit over to an empty washer.

“ _Maybe you should keep him,_ ” she says, reaching over to pinch at my bicep. I give her a dirty look and she chuckles, moving back to her comfy chair behind the desk to watch her telenovelas. 

“You lied to me.” I stand next to Marco as he loads the washer, my hands crossed over my chest, my best pained-slash-offended pout on my face. He blinks up at me, stuffing an armload of pants into the washer. I notice that he doesn’t sort his laundry either, apparently.

“Did I?”

“You said you only understand a little Spanish.”

He scratches his cheek lightly and smiles. “I guess hearing it so much lately brought it back.”

I glare at him. He smiles and closes the washer, taking the bag of quarters weighing down my loose pants out of my pocket. As he feeds the machine, I narrow my eyes at him. The effect is lost on him. Dear god, he’s already immune to my grumpiness.

“How much have you understood over the last few days?”

“Ummm…” he glances at the ceiling, thinking, and leans against a dryer. “Everyone in the neighborhood is really concerned about your love life?”

I groan and turn bright red. Trying to hide my flush in my hands, I lean back against the rumbling washer, refusing to look at him.

He lets me wallow for a moment, and I’m starting to think that this might be punishment for the sweatpants. 

I recover a little and stand on a chair next to him, using the boost to sit on top of the industrial-sized dryer. Abuela hates it when I do this, but she’s so absorbed in her show right now that I can probably get away with it. Marco peers up at me over his shoulder, still smiling a bit.

We watch the washer spin, playing ‘punch Marco when the red shirt goes by’ for a little while.

“Hey, Jean,” he asks after about seven punches, rubbing his sore shoulder.

“Mm?”

“Did you have a boyfriend before this?”

I sigh and ruffle my hair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. I tap my heels lightly against the dryer, but the sound echoes loudly through the machine. “Yeah, for a while.”

“What happened?”

I swallow and try really really hard not to think about what happened. I just give him a listless shrug, and he kind of gets the picture.

“They never care about my girlfriends,” I mumble after a while, lacing my fingers. The red shirt goes by again. I sock Marco in the shoulder. He pinches the back of my knee in retaliation, which nearly sends me rolling off the dryer in hysterics, so he gives. I can see the evil glint in his eye, though, and suddenly I’m reluctant to ever leave my safe perch.

“How long were you dating?”

“Who?”

He stares at me, then scratches his cheek. “The guy, I guess.”

I sigh and look at my hands, sucking on my bottom lip. “A year and a half, maybe?”

“What about the girls?”

I think really hard, honestly drawing a blank on the last girl I dated. And all the ones before that. Well, except the brief few months I had with Sasha in middle school. Wow, really? A straight blank for the last god knows how many years?

He laughs at me. “You look like you’re gonna have an aneurysm…”

“I might. I dunno.”

“I guess we solved that mystery, huh?” I make a face at him, and he only gives me a kind smile in return, adjusting his lean so that he’s facing me, arms crossed loose across his chest. “Are you sure you’re not gay?”

“Excuse you, tits are fantastic.”

He laughs and puts his hands up, shifting his weight a bit. “Alright, sorry.”

“What about you?”

Marco blinks up at me, eyes wide. “Me?”

“No shit, who else?” I spread my arms wide, gesturing at the whole horde of nobody in the Laundromat. 

Nodding, he looks down and picks at his fingers a little. “I dunno. I think I had a girlfriend in high school, but it’s been a really long time.”

“Nothing since then?”

He shrugs and looks deep into the washer, contemplating. From this height, I can see a little line of freckles on top of his ear. 

“It’s not really something I’ve been thinking about, you know?”

“I guess.” That makes sense. He probably had a lot more shit to worry about. “Aren’t priests supposed to be celibate anyway?”

He turns back to me, smiling again, and raises an eyebrow. “That’s Catholic priests. You keep getting us mixed up.”

“Meh,” I reply, pulling my legs up onto the dryer and crossing them. “So you can have a wife or whatever?”

“If I want.”

I lean my chin on my palm and give him a smarmy grin. “What would the perfect Mrs. Bodt look like, then? Maybe we can dig her up somewhere in our glorious misadventures this week.”

He laughs, reaching up to flick my nose before stretching his arms over his head. “I think you’re picking up habits from abuela.”

“Shaddup.”

Lacing his fingers on the back of his neck, he purses his lips and looks out the windows behind me. “I don’t really have a type…”

“No?”

“Not really.” He shrugs and folds his arms on top of the dryer next to mine, resting his chin on them. “I like people for who they are, not what they look like.”

“I imagine there’s not too much chance to meet girls being a priest, huh?”

He smiles up at me and leans his cheek against his arms, studying me for a second. I flick my eyes back to the washer. Red shirt. I don’t sock Marco. “Not really, no. It’s service, not speed-dating.”

I laugh and reach down, ruffling his already-messy hair, and he gives a protesting sputter. “I guess Mrs. Right will come along whenever she feels like it,” I mumble.

Smoothing his hair back down (the cowlick springs straight back up), Marco peers up at me. He flushes a little and looks back at the floor. “You know,” he starts, and I lean back on my hands. “Just ‘cause I’m a priest doesn’t mean I feel anything… bad about gay people.”

I blink at him. Had I given him that impression? I don’t honestly think Marco could feel anything bad about any type of people.

“Also,” he says, looking at the washer as it buzzes. “I said I like _people_. That doesn’t just mean girls.”

My mouth falls open, but he’s already shuffling over to the washer, popping it open and grabbing an armload of wet clothes. He stuffs them into the dryer I’m sitting on, his cheeks red, purposely not looking at me.

When he’s fed the machine and leans against the neighboring one with his hands stuffed in his pockets, I lean down and look at him through narrowed eyes. He blinks at me, gaze shifting nervously.

“Marco.”

“Yeah?”

“… Did you just come out to me?”

He stares at me for a long while, then flicks his glance upward again. He tends to do that when he’s thinking, I’ve noticed. “I… guess?” I lean up again, smiling warmly. I feel all warm and fuzzy. “I mean, it’s not something I’ve ever stressed about. I’ve never talked about it just because it’s never come up. You know?”

I nod and hop off the dryer, my feet stinging at the impact of the floor, then turn to him. I clap him on the shoulders, looking up a little to meet his eyes. He’s giving me a bemused expression.

“I will hold your gay little secret close to my heart,” I say, shaking him gently. He allows it, moving back and forth under my hands.

“It’s not gay. It’s just… me. I guess.”

“Fine. I will hold your Marco little secret close to my heart.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s better.”

I laugh and pat him on the shoulder, turning to stroll up the aisle toward the door. He trots after me, looking back at the dryer. It’s not like I’m abandoning our clothes. I just want a pack of smokes. I tell him so, and he nods, stuffing his hands back into his pockets to protect himself against the frigid air. 

“How long have you lived here?” We jog across the slushy street again. I jump across a big puddle onto the sidewalk.

“Hmmm,” I mumble, rolling my flannel’s sleeves down and walking quickly to the corner. “Six years or so, I guess. Jeez.”

He laughs and tries to burrow into his pockets, trotting ahead of me to hurry into the corner store, which is blissfully warm. I follow him in. “Is that how you know everyone?”

I shrug, poking my head up but finding the deli empty. Joe must be at one of his ten thousand other properties today. I look over at the counter and wave at Manny, who’s enjoying his second job with some kind of handheld game thing. “Yeah, I guess so.” I turn up the narrow aisle toward the drinks and grab a Monster. He raises his eyebrows, and I brush past him, mumbling, “Don’t judge me, you.”

Manny tosses a pack of cigarettes on the counter next to my drink and hands me my change, leaning down against the counter to peer from me to Marco. “ _You sure he’s not your boyfriend? Aren’t those your clothes?_ ” 

Flipping him the bird, I unwrap my cigarettes and hand him the balled-up wrapper. “Don’t you ever go home?”

Marco slides up next to me and sets down a drink of his own, and before he can get embarrassed about having left his wallet in my apartment, I pay for it. He thanks me and mumbles something about paying me back, but I’m not listening. I wave to Manny again and head outside, lighting my cigarette with the Zippo from the factory truck’s glovebox. Souvenir.

Opening his drink, Marco takes a deep gulp, looking up and down the street while I get myself sorted. Change and lighters and pack in the right place, drink in my hand, all that. We run across the street to the Laundromat, and Marco’s nice enough to wait outside with me while I smoke, even though I tell him he doesn’t have to.

The rest of the day passes in this sort of way. Calm, easy, filled with light banter. It’s almost like the world isn’t slowly filling up with hell’s rejects or something. We bring the laundry back and he changes, grateful to look like a real adult again. We go out to buy him a cheap prepaid phone. It’s one of those old Razr things, and he laughs as we walk down the street, pressing the buttons experimentally. 

“You know, I remember when these things were so popular.”

“Yeah?” I laugh, blowing smoke up at the clouds, glad to be wearing a hoodie again. It’s much warmer. “All the cool kids had them.”

He flips it open and closed, then grins at me. “Am I a cool kid yet?”

I laugh loudly and chuck my cigarette into a puddle. “Not by a mile, nerd-butt.”

“What?” I laugh louder, dodging his pinching fingers, and we jog up the stairs to my apartment, intent on vegging out for the rest of the day.

We sprawl on the couch, somehow finding a way to fit together where we’re both comfortable. I give him my phone number, Levi’s, and Connie’s, just in case he needs me, or if there’s an emergency, or if he’s in dire need of a quick fart joke. He texts me a dorky knock-knock joke and laughs when I groan loudly and toss my phone onto the bed.

There’s not a whole lot to do in my apartment. I haven’t had a vacation since I moved in, so it’s really just an existing/studying space. I guess I could start on my lesson plans for the semester, but honestly, they never change anyway. As for the undergrad labs, I’m pretty sure the lab coordinator is just going to give me a script and tell me to not kill anyone.

We pass the time into the evening just talking, tossing things at each other, snacking on whatever we can find in my cabinets, having already procrastinated going grocery shopping. It’s… comfortable. Easy. If not for my throbbing face and his fucked eye, I’d almost swear that we live a normal life. The marks on our bodies don’t let me forget the score, though.

“Hey, Jean,” he says, startling me out of my introspection. I look up at him and he snaps a picture at me with his phone, chuckling. “I’ll get a better one later,” he says, snapping his phone shut and tossing it over with mine on the bed. I shift down in my seat and stretch my leg further over his waist, fingers laced behind my head. He contemplates me again, and I raise an eyebrow.

“You just took a picture, so…”

He laughs. “Do you dye your hair?”

I scoff and ruffle the blonde mess on top of my head. I think it might be getting a little long, since Armin had mentioned it. “No.” I smooth it down to ensure that he doesn’t catch sight of my dark roots. “It’s totally natural like this.”

“Mhm.”

“Do you dye yours?”

He raises his eyebrows, laughing. “Why would I?”

“To cover all your grey hairs.”

He digs a toe into my ribs and I wiggle, laughing as I trap his foot between my arm and my side. “I’m only a year older than you, you know.”

“The key word there being ‘older.’” 

“Har har.” He tosses a crumpled-up bit of paper at me as I’m pulling a cigarette out, and it hits me square in the nose. He celebrates for a moment. I roll my eyes but smile as I light my cigarette. He leans down and slides the ashtray across the floor, from my side of the couch to his. 

I look out the window as I smoke, the sky turning this dark purple over the spread of row homes that I can see from up here. The window isn’t big, but it faces the river, which is pretty okay. Big chunks of ice float around in the murky water, betraying the temperature outside. The lines of row homes spread off into the distance, giving way to warehouses and whatever else as the trails approach the river.

“Hey, Jean?”

“Hey, nerd?”

“Why’d you get your nipples pierced?”

I blink back at him, and he flushes, averting his gaze to some really interesting spot on the wall. It’s the same question I’m used to, but it lacks the accusatory tone that generally comes with it. Like he’s genuinely curious. It’s a nice change.

“I like the look.” I pull off my cigarette, looking up to the ceiling again. His toes curl a little against my side, so I release his hostage foot. “I dunno, it’s just something I wanted to do.”

“Oh.” A long, mildly awkward silence. I glance down at him. He bites his lip before softly asking, “Do they… uh, feel different?”

“Mmm,” I consider, trying really hard and failing to blow smoke rings. Gandalf makes it look really easy. “Yeah, I’d say so, but I can’t really describe how.”

“Oh,” he says again. He’s really red at this point. Not as red as he’d been when I first showed him, but he’s getting there. I have mercy for once and choose not to tease him, reaching down around his leg to put out my cigarette. When I lean back onto the couch, arms resting behind my head, I catch him looking at me again and raise my eyebrows. He sits up a little, twiddling his fingers in his lap. “Uh… c-can I see them again?”

It’s my turn to flush. I hesitate, but nod, reaching down to unzip my hoodie again. The movement is the same as last night, but somehow it feels different. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it has something to do with all the whacking off I’ve been doing today. I pull up my shirt over my nipples, feeling oddly exposed. Even my chest feels like it’s blushing. I wonder if my whole body is going to burst into flames.

The image of the creature from the black lagoon grinning and bursting into flames in a whirl of sparks pops into my mind. It effectively kills any boner that may or may not have been forming.

He leans forward and examines my chest, and this feels a little ridiculous. He reaches forward. I jump a little when he traces the lines of the tattoo over my sternum. 

“What’s that?”

I look down at it. It’s a pretty old piece by this point, but still one of my favorites. 

“Sunflower,” I mumble. And it is. Just a simple, thin-lined sunflower in the center of my chest, the stem extending downward toward my navel.

“I know that,” he murmurs, giving me a look and a half-grin. “I mean, why do you have a sunflower on your chest?”

Leaving my shirt rucked up into my armpits, I rest my arms behind my head again and relax. The mildly chilly air makes my skin break out a little into goosebumps, my nipples perking again. I close my eyes. “It’s for my mum.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

“She like sunflowers?”

“She loved them, yeah. Her dad in France had a big field of them. Seeing them here reminded her of home.”

He’s quiet for a moment, just examining the lines across my chest. “Did she pass away?”

I nod. “When I was in high school. Cancer.”

“… Sorry.”

Opening my eyes, I consider him for a second. The honesty in his apology is obvious in his eyes, even as he flicks his gaze between my chest and my eyes. “It’s okay.” And it is. I’ve long since gotten over it, and hell, that was the whole reason for the tattoo. Never far from my heart, blah blah blah.

Seeming to remember the purpose for me exposing my white-ass chest, he looks over my hard nipples, examining them almost too closely. I sincerely hope that he doesn’t poke at them like he had my tattoo, because what I had meant by ‘yeah, they feel different,’ is ‘yeah, they feel fucking _awesome_.’

A loud knock sounds at my door and we both startle, my knee coming up and catching him in the ribs. I apologize quickly but he just laughs, waving his hands. He extricates himself from our tangle and moves to answer the door. We’d ordered food. I totally forgot. Not pizza again, thankfully. Just burgers from this little place half a mile or so away. Marco pays the frozen delivery guy and gives him some kind, encouraging words, and I tilt my head back to watch him.

He comes back to the couch and sits down, putting the bag on the table. He crosses his legs and digs his food out. I realize, with a dark flush, that I’d just been laying here with my shirt up, and if the delivery guy saw that, it would probably look pretty suggestive. I sit up and let my shirt fall down again, reaching for the rest of the food.

By the time we’re done eating, the sky is completely dark, and I’m already fucking tired again. I run a hand through my hair, sucking on a post-dinner cigarette, feet resting on the coffee table. We hadn’t continued from where we’d been interrupted, and to be honest, I’m pretty okay with that. I only have so much self-control.

Marco glances over at me and pokes me in the side, laughing at my squirming. “You look about ready to pass out.”

“I might.” I exhale slowly, watching the ember burn on my cigarette listlessly. “Think I might call it an early night, to be honest. I got up way too early.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm, like seven am or something.”

He wrinkles his nose, clearly confused as to why I would elect to do so. I’m not about to inform him why. I sniff and grind out my cigarette, blowing smoke out of my nose, before moving to the bed and flopping onto it.

Face-down, I manage to wriggle out of my loose pants and under the nice warm blanket, and yeah. It’s bedtime. I toss my hoodie out of the cocoon I’ve made. Marco laughs good-naturedly. I curl up on my side of the bed and listen to him walking around softly, investigating my bookshelf. The sound of him moving around my tiny apartment lulls me to sleep pretty easily.

\--

My phone wakes me up in the damn middle of the night again. It shrills, and the sound is confusing, disorienting. I’d been dreaming about elevators again, but the details are already fading as I dig my phone out from under my pillow. Marco’s still awake, reading a book he’d pulled off my shelf, looking over at the sound.

“Hrrngh,” I manage, wondering who the hell is calling me. It isn’t a number I recognize, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

The sound of heavy breathing sounds over the phone again, but this is different from Levi’s panting three-am call. I sit up straight, the blanket falling off my shoulders. My heart pounds, and I stare at the wall.

Harried, shaky, muffled behind a hand.

That breathing is unmistakably the sound of someone being hunted.

I’m already rolling out of bed. “Hello? Where are you?” I almost jump into my pants, trying to fasten them with one hand while I grab socks with the other. Marco is alarmed, standing next to the bed.

The person speaks. “Jean—”

I pause, then pull my clothes on that much faster. “Mikasa?”

“Jean, it’s Armin—”

My blood runs cold. I freeze again. My fingers feel numb. Marco walks up next to me, face tense, worried.

“It’s—shit,” she curses softly, and I hear the rustle of fabric and the sound of her feet slamming against the pavement. I tug my hoodie on quickly, but when Marco goes to grab his, I wave my hands, mouthing ‘no.’

There’s no fucking way I’m doing this again. Not with Marco.

“His cell broke,” she whispers in my ear, and I crush the phone against my ear as I pull my shoes on. “He got out.”

My mouth is dry. I drop my keys in my pocket and cross quickly into my kitchen, hauling open a drawer. There’s a suspicious array of knives in there. Mikasa’s stifled breathing passes into my ears as I root around for the right knife.

I have four fucking silver knives and of course I can’t find _any of them_.

“We’re in Old Trost,” she breathes, and in the background I hear a low growl. Her breath catches. I hold mine, fingers searching, searching, until I pull out the two better knives. I turn to Marco and hand him one, and he stares at me, utterly confused. 

“I’m coming,” I murmur into the phone, trying hard not to give her location away. She hangs up, and I about wing my phone across the room, panic making me violent again. Marco looks at me, holding the knife awkwardly.

“Jean, what—”

I point to the knife. “That’s silver. If I come back all scratched up or bitten or weird in any way—” He stares at me. I gesture to my temple. The color fades from his face.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No.” The finality in my voice stalls him for a second. I swallow thickly, my throat tight, hands sweating. My brain’s going nowhere at a thousand miles an hour. I turn and dig under the sink, pulling out a can of spray paint. “Stay here,” I say, whirling out the door and pulling it shut behind me. I stop to spray a strong ward on the door, the paint dripping down the wood in places, but right now I don’t care. I’m shutting Marco in as best I can and going to what might be painful death.

If Armin manages to get Mikasa… I choke on that thought and toss the paint can aside, hauling ass down the stairs. I shove my knife in my boot as I go. Once I’m outside, I unlock my bike, noticing that the streets apparently got cleared of slush recently. I stand on the pedals and ride as fast as humanly possible toward Old Trost.


	6. Where Soul Meets Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My world is crashing down around me. I have to keep going, though, somehow. I'm a big boy, I'll make it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i still have a tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

Twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four goddamn hours is all I ask for.

Just one short day without the immediate threat of everything I love being torn away from me, bloody and screaming.

Houses fly past me and my face stings in the wind, my bike tires skidding along the wet streets as I head toward that shithole of a tourist spot, the place where Armin’s normal life had basically come to a complete halt. My fault.

I take a deep breath. The frigid air stings my throat, but it’s enough to break me out of some intense guilt spiral. I need to focus. Even through the panic, through my heart racing and the agitation building in my muscles, I know that I need to _focus_. If I’m scatter-brained when I get there, three people could die tonight. Maybe more, depending on how badly I fuck this up.

Let’s just aim for zero. Low-ball it.

The streets around Old Trost are cleaner, neater, more well-groomed than in any other area of the city. The apartments and shops here are insanely expensive. The whole area is just one big ritzy bomb waiting to go up in flames, all because of adorable historical little Trost with its cramped streets and shitty houses. It got famous for some battle or another. No one can quite figure out what happened, but based on the whispers I hear in the supernatural underground, that’s probably for the better. Whatever it was, it was no good.

Old Trost looms up out of the darkness, blinding white spotlights trained on its high, cracked walls, standing immense over the rest of the city. A fucking eyesore. There’s no way to see the sky around here. You look up and all you find is oppression, thousand-year-old denial, shedding old fears like a snake’s skin on the high-class boutiques lining the narrow streets around it.

I turn my bike down the side street that winds around the monstrosity, the weather-worn stone dampening the sounds of my frantic breaths already. The main gate is locked. Like that matters to me. I pedal down the cobblestone street, and it gets narrower and narrower the further along I go.

When I finally hit the back end, I dump my bike into bushes surrounding my destination. The back end of the little city is flat, so the whole thing is shaped like a closed-in horseshoe. The wall around back had been knocked down and restored within recent history, but the contractors did a shitty job, and the masonry is crumbling worse than the ancient stonework it’s meant to represent. That’s why there’s a little hole hidden in some barren bushes, just big enough for someone like me to squeeze in without being noticed.

There used to be night guards here. When a long series of them ended up crazy or dead, they just gave up and hoped for the best.

Whatever was putting off the guards apparently put off the vandals too. This place is _dead_ at night, dark houses untouched by the modernity that aerosol paint vomits over every other surface in this broken city. Oh, sorry, there’s one tag, half-finished, sprayed like brains across the back of a dirty white house. Half of it is something approximating ornate. The other half is a scanty line dragging suddenly to the side, leading over the ground and into the locked basement doors resting innocently against the stone. 

At night, no one is here, and no one wants to be here. That’s how Armin manages to use it for a changing place, just like the wolf that turned him. Until I gutted that guy, that is.

Walking into Old Trost is like walking into another dimension, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s not. Time stopped here a thousand years ago. The silence looming between the towering walls is deafening. My ears start ringing low as I straighten up from the gap in the masonry. 

I stop for a second and listen. All I’m getting so far is ringing, muffled voices too low to discern clearly, whispers in the dark. Chills run down my spine. I try not to listen to them too closely. The almost silent laughter echoing between my ears is too close for comfort, riding the curling, buzzing waves of static wrapping tight around me.

Instead I move onto one of the main streets from behind the house that had shielded my entrance and start running.

Listening as I move, I dart through the streets, dodging down alleys and stopping frequently to try and decide on a direction. It shouldn’t be hard to find them when the air is this still. I just hope that I’m listening for the sounds of hungry werewolf, not werewolf dining on torn-apart flesh. 

I dart down a short hill, headed in the direction of the jail, and I come to a stop again across from an old barber’s shop. The heavy wooden sign creaks at me slightly, icicles hanging from it.

The pair of hands that shoot out from a shaded doorway behind me wrap around me, one across my mouth and the other punishingly tight around my bicep, before dragging me through the house and into the ancient wood kitchen. I panic, taking deep, ineffective breaths, my feet scrabbling along the rotten wood, but the thing dragging me overpowers me easily.

When the hands let go of me, I immediately drop into a crouch and jump away, whipping my knife out and turning to face my assailant as I land. 

It’s Mikasa. She’s giving me the same blank look as always, but I know better than to think she’s relaxed. 

I stand, not sheathing my knife, and move back in front of her.

“Did he bite you?” I breathe, looking over her for any rips or injuries or blood. She shakes her head and moves to peek out the window.

“You smell,” she says, and I grimace. Yeah, I imagine I do. Smoke, sweat, residue from other jobs… Armin’s gonna pick that up in a heartbeat.

“Stay here. I’ll try to lead him back to the jail and find another cell,” I mumble, already not crazy about the idea.

She turns to me, and though her expression hasn’t changed, suddenly she’s terrifying. There’s a madness under her mask that hasn’t been there before. Not that I’ve ever seen. Her eyes are dull, her pale skin ashen, and her dark, mussed hair lies across her face in some order of discord. I shiver again. She doesn’t need to tell me that she disagrees with my plan.

Mikasa’s never been that kind of person. She’s never been the kind of person to sit down and give up hope. 

She is, however, the kind of person to do something completely idiotic when someone she loves is involved. I heard she once destroyed an entire gang of muggers after they’d managed to take down Eren and Armin in high school. They managed to escape, thanks to her impressive violence, but Mikasa had suffered a broken eye socket and a brutal concussion for it.

I’d still tried to ask her out.

Not my best idea.

I shake my head, turning to investigate the rotten old house around us. The second floor had fallen through in the living room, and the front door was gone, but it’s one of the few houses around here that still boasts an apparently functional first floor. Most of these old shacks are just three-floor pits of broken wood and ancient chaos, big piles of splinters and mildew jutting up from dirty basements.

How does anyone actually pay money to see this place?

Especially considering there are entire blocks that were just levelled by whatever happened.

“Where did you see Armin last?” I turn back to her and pull out my phone, putting it on silent before turning it off. No need to get ripped to shreds over something idiotic like a text.

She sighs and strides quickly past me, and I notice then the switchblade in her hand. It’s probably silver. Mikasa’s no idiot.

She pokes her head out, decides that it’s clear, and we jog out together, trying to find the balance between fast and quiet. Not like it matters too much. Werewolves are big, and their senses of smell and hearing are incredible. Sight isn’t so great, but when you can hear a pin drop from ten feet away and know that the pin smells like sweat, you don’t need to see very well. 

When she grinds to a halt near a small clearing and crouches, I follow suit, and together we look out into the plaza. My breath catches when I see him.

I’ve seen Armin in his… furrier form before, but let me tell you, it is a thousand times worse when he’s not behind bars.

The sky clears a little, and the light of the full moon dyes the plaza a deathly blue. His shoulders hunched, covered in messy blonde hair, Armin skulks around the far end of the plaza, sniffling and snuffing and stamping around on a pair of huge paws, toes bony, vicious talons curling over the stones under him. His hands dangle by his sides, muscular fingers ending in wicked black claws. His long hair hangs loose over his face, bright eyes edged with black searching endlessly. 

I know the look. Hungry, sad, angry, a thousand things crammed into the thin rim of his blue irises, struggling to contain his widening pupils that constantly adjust as he hunts. His pupils constrict and dilate like a cat’s. The blackness in his eyes always seemed to me like it’s trying to swallow what little blue it can still find.

Mikasa turns to look at me, and the look in her eyes makes me shake my head rapidly. _‘No, you are absolutely not going to be the bait,’_ my expression says to her, and I can already see the rebellion in her eyes. She wants to take charge. She wants to lead Armin back to the jail. The calculations are returning to her now, now that she at least has backup, but that doesn’t soothe my panic at all.

I stand up, and her eyebrows furrow, but before she can say anything I’m sprinting across the plaza. I jump up onto the edge of a long disused fountain. The stone under my feet shifts, threatening to tip me over, but I keep moving, and Armin’s already turning to look at me.

Skidding to a stop ten feet in front of him, I stare up at him and realize maybe I should have thought of a plan first.

He turns to face me, hot breaths fogging out of his snout, a growl dripping from his sharp teeth. I wonder if he recognizes me. Probably not.

I decide to go with my gut instinct and sprint left, up the winding street, aiming for the jail. It’s no use trying to outsmart him anyway; werewolves tend to be dumbed-down versions of the person they’re hiding in, but the thing about Armin is that his base level of intelligence is terrifyingly, exponentially higher than the average human. I have no doubts that his wolf form is equally cunning. 

No, the only hope lies in chaos, making split-second decisions that even I don’t know are happening until they’re already executed. Now, now, now, hurry, hurry.

The sound of his monstrous, hairy feet slamming against the stones propels me forward. My legs are burning already. But slowing down means dying at this point. He’s already got my scent.

Taking a hard right, I weave down a narrow alley, and the dark windows of the shanty houses boxing in the streets stare at me like wide, soulless eyes as they whip by. He crashes into something as his claws scrabble at the cobblestones to redirect his speed and he lets out a huge, guttural whine, the sound grating to my ears. I wish he sounded more like a normal dog and less like ten fucking hellhounds.

The alley ends, pouring out onto a wide avenue, and I bolt right again, heading for the jail at the curve of the broad street. The row of houses on one side lies crushed into their basements, the huge tear moving through them betraying the sheer size of whatever killed this place first, and I have to jump over rubble and dodge huge chunks of house as I move. Thinking this fast is exhausting, anxiety-provoking. I hope with everything that isn’t dedicated to hauling ass that if I trip, I at least land on my knife in a way that guarantees a swift exit.

I gave up on a hero’s death a long time ago.

Mikasa sprints out of an alley a little ways in front of me. I curse, heading towards her. She’s already moving toward the jail. I didn’t distract him for long enough. I hope to god Mikasa had a backup cell ready, because Armin’s not going to wait patiently while we dick around with Plan B. 

I don’t want to consider Plan C.

Her little body slams into the door to the jail and it falls open. She disappears in the darkness, the dirty red of her scarf whipping down a hallway inside. To the left. Alright.

I jump through the door once I get there, feet skidding on the smooth stone and kicking up dust, then haul ass toward the left cell block. It’s the least run-down of the blocks, the least infested, but that isn’t saying much when at least half of the place is crumbled in on itself.

The sound of Armin’s claws ripping through the other door and yanking it off its hinges screams through the silence. His snuffling breaths follow, hot in the winter air, and his claws scraping and scratching along the stone after me sends me sprinting faster. 

I can see Mikasa in the cell block ahead, struggling with a door, so I take the first random turn that I find, opening my mouth to holler incoherently, spewing every word I know at a deafening volume. Please be distracted, Armin, _please_. Do this for me. I run up the dark hallway, stumbling over stones that jut up enough to catch my toes, trying the best I can to not fucking _die_ , and as I’m moving, I realize that his heavy footsteps aren’t slamming after me. God dammit. I turn and sprint back the way I came. 

Mikasa’s red scarf flies behind her as she races along the lower floor, keys jangling loud, and Armin’s already jumping off the landing to join her. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

“Armin!” I scream his name, staring down at the blonde hackles standing out on his shoulders, and he turns to look up at me, snarling. 

Trapped in his black claws is Mikasa, struggling to get away. He’s monstrous over her, at least twice her size and worth his weight in violence.

He huffs again, spraying hot steam from his nostrils. We make eye contact for a too-brief second before he turns down and sinks his dripping, shiny teeth into her miniscule shoulder.

My breath catches and holds in my chest. My mind is a blur. The movements I make don’t even feel like mine, like I’ve left my own body for a moment. I vault over the railing and fall onto his huge form, knife first, the silver blade sinking deep into his shoulder a good six inches from his spine. I missed.

As he straightens up and gives a shrill, immeasurably loud shriek of pain, I link my arms around his neck and swing down onto the dirty floor. Mikasa’s pained groan echoes distantly through my urgency. Armin’s claws tear at her clothes before he drops her. I grab her and swing her onto my back. Armin’s still screaming, the sound hellish as it burrows into my mind, and billowing white smoke pours forth from the silver burning at his flesh.

I turn and sprint away, Mikasa’s nails digging into my shoulders. Her blood is hot on my back. Whatever she’s screaming into my ear doesn’t quite make it to my brain. I bolt down the hall and toward the main stairs. Armin’s screams echo off the stones around us, giving the illusion that he’s right behind us, and for all I know, that’s the case. 

Bolting up the stairs, I scramble across the slippery stones, vaguely aware of the fact that Mikasa’s hammering on my back and struggling in my grasp. It doesn’t matter. The only thought in my skull is ‘away,’ and every human facility I have is screaming to obey that one thought.

We’re back in the frozen Trost air a moment later, and I turn toward the main gate. It’s so far. Mikasa’s hard to carry when she’s fighting me so much, but adrenaline gives me the rare strength to overpower her and keep going. My feet slam against the pavement. My breaths sound insanely loud in my own ears.

So do Armin’s.

His snarling chases me up the street, and his claws clack loud and frequently against the stones, and it sounds like there’s so many more of them.

Shit. He’s on all fours. Fuck. 

I try to speed up, legs burning, my lungs screaming for oxygen and straining to fuel the deafening flight instinct powering me. The sides of the arching main gate come into view, the culminating point of the three arterial roads at the apex of the horseshoe. Just gotta reach it. Hide in the office, open the gate, escape with Mikasa—

And Armin.

Reevaluate.

I skid around a corner down a winding side street, dragging Armin away from my intended destination, but I have no idea where I’m going. Or how I’m going to lose him. Sporadic movement will only prevent him from anticipating me. It’s still impossible to outrun him when he’s on all fours.

We burst onto the main road and Armin tackles me, his hot shoulder knocking my legs out from under me, and I see stars as my head cracks off the pavement. I roll, keeping Mikasa under me. She’s slack now. Must have passed out from blood loss. Armin crouches over me, snarling breaths like fire on my face, and he reaches up with his huge claws as he rounds up a good strike. 

My mind is blank. My breaths struggle to leave me. I watch his eyes. The blackness has won, completely covering the blue that had struggled for so long to keep its head above the surface. Malice creeps out from between narrowed, hairy eyelids. His huge hand comes down, claws bared. I bring my legs up and curl to the side, trying to block my guts, and it works. I barely feel his claws as they dig deep into the meat of my thigh, blood spattering the ground in the trail of his slash. He snarls again, opening his mouth wide, and the rows of razor-sharp teeth lowering to my face drip steaming saliva onto me.

I think about Armin, about to eat my head. I made this monster, and now it’s going to eat me. He lowers toward me in slow motion, the overheating computer running my brain slowing each and every one of my last moments to a lifetime of guilt bubbling over the thick, cracking layer of denial. I have time to think about his face as I forced him away with my words. I have time to think about how I could have saved him if I’d never fucking tried.

Tears spill down my face and I don’t even have the presence to wipe them away. Not like my hands can keep up, their slow, organic movements too clumsy to even begin to stifle the pain spreading from my chest through my entire being.

The knife that comes up through the bottom of Armin’s jaw pierces his tongue and stops his advancing bite. It makes a sizzling sound, the white smoke curling away from the spurting blood, the meaty flesh between his jaws tightening and twitching. He stops, eyes wide, then flicks his gaze to the right, wide eyes surveying the force currently holding him at bay. Rumbling snorts escape him, and a soft whine, but he quickly jerks his chin and dislodges the knife from the person’s grip before turning to roar in the guy’s face.

Marco stares right into Armin’s bloody, dripping mouth with that furious, dark expression I still don’t understand.

There’s a lot happening here that I don’t quite understand. Erwin reaching under me and slinging Mikasa over his broad shoulder is one of them. Marco reaching up to Armin’s throat and wrapping his hands in the matting fur is another. Armin growls at the pressure, trying to rear up to his full height, but both his eyes and mine widen when it seems like he can’t. He struggles against the force of Marco’s hands holding him an accessible level.

His huge hands come to wrap around Marco, but he is undeterred, holding Armin’s snout close. Sharp jaws snap open and closed in Marco’s face, struggling sounds escaping, blood flecking over the priest’s face. Marco reacts quickly. He reaches up with one hand and rips out the knife, and as Armin leans forward and tilts his head to open his jaws around Marco, he rears back with the knife and looks to aim for the werewolf’s temple.

I can’t help it. “Marco!” I’m screaming, trying to scramble to my feet, and Levi’s grip on my arms isn’t enough to hold me back. “Marco, don’t!”

Marco pauses, turning to look at me, confusion spreading over his face. He’s lucid, as cold and aware as he has been this whole time. Knife held over his head, bracketed by black claws and shining teeth, I’m afraid of Marco for the first time.

Levi moves fast. He punches Armin right in the nose, following with a quick stab with Mikasa’s knife to the cold, wet flesh, and the wolf reels back, hissing at the unexpected blow. Levi’s already wrapping a huge length of rope around his snout, running behind him to jump on his stooped back. Armin lets go of his nose to try and scratch at Levi, reaching behind himself, his full ten-foot height now. 

Marco stares at me, then at the blood dripping from my leg, his eyes widening.

“Jean!” I flick my gaze up to Levi, who’s managing to hold Armin at bay, dodging his claws. “Come on!”

I shake away growing dizziness and turn to Erwin, who hands me another length of rope and a syringe before turning and sprinting back toward the open main gate, Mikasa flopping against his back.

Turning, I move quickly to Armin, uncapping the syringe and jabbing it into his hairy stomach. I empty the sedative into his guts and loop the rope around one of his flailing arms as it comes down again. 

We wait for just a second, just long enough for a long, high-pitched whine to escape Armin, before it’s time to move. Levi stays on Armin’s shoulders as I lead him back toward the jail, limping along the alley I’d come from. Marco helps me, holding the rope around his hand for me, while I assume the ever-glamorous position of ‘bait.’ The adrenaline is draining from me. I feel exhausted. The blood running down my leg doesn’t help, nor does the gritty feeling of the gashes along my hip and thigh. 

I turn more often than I should to stare over Marco’s head at Armin’s relaxing face, his eyes growing glassy as he pads awkwardly along. The fight has left him at this point, but Levi doesn’t release the muzzle holding his jaw shut. My chest hurts, too tight to breathe, the crushing burden weighing down everything in my system.

Armin stumbles behind us into the jail, losing lucidity, and we manage to cram him into a relatively functional cell on the lower level, locking it with the keys Mikasa had dropped when Armin tried to eat her.

I drop like a corpse right as Armin does. He curls up into a ball, I press my cheek to the cold dirt floor, and I’m not sure which of us is crying harder.

Not the wolf. The real Armin. I can almost see him there, inside the wolf’s pleasantly-sleeping face, screaming and pulling at his hair and cursing his existence. My fault. The image turns fuzzy. I close my eyes and black out, Marco’s harried shouts spinning and echoing far away from me.

\--

When I come to, there’s a dull pain in my right thigh, in my hip, along my ass, in my head, and muffled shouts are coming from somewhere above me. I open my eyes. The ceiling above me is not mine.

“—And you’ve been keeping this shit from me for _years_ —”

“I don’t feel like I need to explain myself right now, brat—”

“You’re fucking telling me Armin’s a _werewolf_ , Mikasa might be dying, Jean’s bleeding out on my couch, there’s a fucking _apocalypse_ coming—”

“It’s not the apocalypse. Can you just—”

A slamming sound, a few shouts, the door opening and closing. There’s a pinching pressure in my thigh. I squint down, vision hazy, and examine the head of black hair leaned close to my thigh. Marco. I sigh.

“How did you find me?”

He startles slightly, and the movement causes a supremely uncomfortable tugging sensation. I wince as he apologizes.

“I called Levi,” he mumbles, hands shakily moving back to where they’re trying to stitch up the huge gashes on my thigh. There’s a blanket covering whatever he’s not working on. Namely, my dick. Black stitches wind up my thigh, making an attempt at closing the deep cuts. Blood is smeared across my skin and the towel covering the couch. 

I sigh again after a moment. My hand comes down and pats at the hoodie I’m still wearing. I pull out my cigarettes and stuff one between my lips, searching for my lighter, but I’m not wearing pants. Marco puts the clamp holding a curved suture needle on my thigh and digs the lighter out of his own pocket. He graciously lights my cigarette before moving back to his task.

Levi must have taught him how to suture. I wonder if he stole anesthesia from the hospital, or if something else is numbing the pain.

“Don’t bother with that,” I mumble, smoke curling out of my lips as I speak. He ties off another stitch and glances at me. “I told you earlier what to do.”

He pauses, then gently puts down the tools he’s using. His face is blank, tense as he procures a bottle of rubbing alcohol from somewhere and dumps it across my thigh. It doesn’t burn; I guess Levi must have done some burgling. After he’s cleaned the area, Marco silently returns to what he’s doing, and I sigh heavily.

“Seriously, dude,” I continue after a few stitches, and I can already see his gloved hands shaking. He ignores me and continues, hiding his face from me.

I let him finish up. He’s got to have been working for ages, because this is the last of four good-sized slashes. He reaches under me and rolls me on my side, and I flop listlessly, letting my cigarette ashes fall on the couch. I’ll be dead before Levi can kill me for it, anyway.

I’m not really sure why Marco’s bothering to wrap a bandage around my thigh, tying the ends of a few long lengths of fabric together to manage one continuous cover from my knee up to my groin. He presses a big adhesive bandage to the cut on my hip, another to the ones on my ass, then rolls me back over and pulls the blanket the rest of the way over me. It’s useless. All the stitches, all the bandages, they’ll just rot with the rest of me in my grave if he’ll just listen to my goddamn instructions.

Marco stands and strips his gloves off, flexing his long fingers. He wipes them off on his pants. I stare up at him, mind still hazy. I haven’t heard Eren or Levi since the door slammed upstairs. 

“Marco,” I say quietly. He doesn’t look at me. He just moves to the trash can by the wall, dropping a pile of bloody napkins into the can along with his gloves. Even after he’s done that, he doesn’t look at me. He just faces the wood paneling and searches for answers in the grain.

“Please, come on. It’s all I ask. Can’t you just—”

The sound of Marco’s fist hitting the wall is loud enough to cut me off, the sound cracking through the tense air. I wonder if he broke a knuckle, or if it just sounded like it. He continues staring at the wall, fist resting against the dark wood, not moving. I drag off my cigarette. The nicotine makes my vision blur slightly, sensitive from blood loss.

“You can’t ask me to do this,” he says quietly, his voice lower than I’ve ever heard it, wavering just a little at the end. I stare at his back. His broad shoulders are tense under his t-shirt.

“Marco,” I start, and he turns to look at me with tears in his eyes. He shakes his head, but I talk over him. “I can’t live like that. Either you do it now, while I still have some semblance of humanity, or you have to do it later.” I pause. The silence between us is thick, electric. “When I’m not me anymore.”

He comes back to the edge of the couch, and I stare at him through my smoke. Kneeling, he leans his forehead against my limp forearm on the couch. His brow is sweaty, clammy, and the tremors moving through his body reverberate along my skin. “I won’t,” he says into the couch finally, voice cracking and thick with tears. 

I reach onto the end table behind me and grind my cigarette out on the ashtray I know is there. “It’s gotta be you,” I murmur after a while. The sound is almost a whisper. His breath hitches in response, quiet sobs escaping him, and his fingers come up to tangle with mine, twining together on the lame tweed fabric covered with my gore. His head is shaking, refusing, but he’s not looking at me. My hands are cold against his warm skin.

This is where I come to a realization. My head spins with the gravity of it. I feel sick. I can’t avoid it, though, not when the truth is hammering through my very being and crashing against my blood-starved nerve endings.

It’s already too late.

It’s too deep in me, tying itself in knots between us, around us, within us, and I know it’s way too fucking late.

Luckily, the denial gland has a way of kicking into overtime when you really need it.

I tell myself lamely that it’s still okay. There’s still time. Maybe I can still make him hate me. I can still turn cold, push him aside, hand him off. It’s not too late.

I can still save Marco Bodt’s life.

When you’re half-delirious from blood loss in an unfamiliar basement, telling yourself these lies over and over, it starts getting easy to believe them. I tug my fingers and my arm away from Marco and pull the blanket up to my nose, refusing to look down at him. 

He stares up at me, and his presence is too strong, too overwhelming. He’s searching me, fumbling to make contact, his hands fisting in the blanket. I’m not even sure where to begin.

It’s better if he doesn’t know. He can’t know. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe he hasn’t felt it yet. Maybe he’s just tired and emotional from a long period of staring into my gaping leg muscles. From nearly getting eaten by a blonde monster twice his size. And staring it in the face like he _dared_ it to fuck with him.

I fall asleep again at some point, my brain literally just shutting down in the whirlwind of lies I have to tell myself. 

\--

“… said that…”

Muffled whispers from somewhere nearby. I don’t want to wake up. My head hurts, my chest hurts, my heart feels like it’s pumping sludge through my veins, it’s cold… I just want to go back to sleep. Please?

“… ‘s a fucking idiot, you know…”

My brow furrows. A bandage above my left eyebrow shifts over a huge scrape, the weight clumsy on my face. I feel clammy, despite my skin freezing where it’s not covered by the blanket. My heart is fluttering weakly, quickly, unable to sustain normal function.

“… I don’t…?”

“No. Moron.”

“… him…”

“… -n’t have that… he’s…”

“… -cret.”

“… best. Sorry.”

I slip out of consciousness again, these broken fragments of conversation flapping around in my skull in place of actual thought.

\--

The fever breaks three days later. Levi tells me that while I was out, Marco stayed by my side, diligently changing my bandages and checking my stitches and giving me fluids. I don’t want to think about that. I’m still dizzy, incoherent, just staring up at the psychic’s blank expression. The faintest line draws between his brows, a slight scowl. Eren pops up next to him, bending over to look at me. He leans back up and says something to Levi, but I’m not listening. The world is too pale, spinning, and I figure I must be dying. Figures hell would be the kind of place where you pick up right in the kind of mess you left off in.

Marco comes up next to Eren, looking honestly like shit. Circles under his eyes, pale, his right iris still ringed with a fat half-inch of blood. 

I forget for a moment and reach up to him. He takes my hand without even looking at me, still talking in a low rumble to Levi, but he catches my fingers in his like he’d known they were coming. Our fingers lace together. Sweat drips down my cheek. 

Levi flicks his eyes between us, lighting a cigarette slowly.

“Kirschtein.” 

I open my eyes, having apparently let them fall lax, unfocused. Focusing on him is hard. “Nngh.” That’s the best I can muster.

“Priest’s not gonna kill you.”

If I could summon the brain power to be mad, I’d be mad. Flip some tables, yell, punch something. Really go nuts. As it is, even imagining it hurts, so I just blink.

“Did you forget, idiot?” He exhales smoke slowly, then stuffs his lit cigarette between my lips. I take a drag off of it, lips tight around the filter, the sudden rush of nicotine assaulting my brain and filling my vision with little imploding stars. “Scratches are only 50/50 for turning. If he’d bit you, I’d say you were fucked, but for now we should wait it out.”

Ah. Right. Only a fifty percent chance of turning into a ten-foot, hairy, raging psychopath that rips peoples’ heads off and plays golf with them. What wonderful odds.

I must be feeling better. The sass is strong with me.

Reaching up to take the cigarette from between my lips with my unoccupied, weak fingers, I billow up smoke at them. “What day is it?”

“Fuck only knows.” Levi pulls his phone out. “Saturday.”

Marco runs his thumb over my knuckles as he types out a text one-handed on his dorky flip phone. He’s focusing so hard, brow furrowed, lip poking out a little. The hand holding his phone is the one he’d used to assault the wall. The bruises on his knuckles have already started to fade to a light green.

I let go of Marco’s hand and take another good pull off my cigarette. The smoke burns in my dry mouth. He glances at me, but doesn’t question it.

Suddenly, I remember why I’m here the way I am. The speed at which I sit up makes my head spin, the stitches in my ass giving a painful, tugging protest, my weak muscles crawling under my rubbery skin. It’s a seriously gross feeling all around. The three standing next to me all stare at me, eyebrows raised.

The words come hesitantly. “… Mikasa? Armin?”

They all exchange a glance I’m not entirely comfortable with. My heart drops and flutters around in my stomach like a moth. I look between them, trying to fight the nausea curling up from within me at the change of angle. 

Marco sighs and sits next to my calf, giving my bum leg a wide berth. He slides his phone into his hoodie pocket. “Mikasa’s in the hospital, and Armin’s upstairs.”

“Wallowing in misery,” Levi adds, arms crossed over his chest. 

I look up at Eren. He meets my gaze, holding it, then shrugs. “You guys were just trying to keep me safe. I’m pissed, don’t get me wrong.” He crosses his arms too, hip jutting out to the side slightly. “But I understand why you did it. Shit’s fucked.”

Laughing softly, I pull my stiff legs out from behind Marco and swing them onto the floor. He’s immediately standing, protesting, but I wave him off and use his shirt to pull myself shakily to my feet. My knees knock together. In fact, my whole body does some variation of that motion, every muscle crying out in protest, but fuck that. I want to see Armin.

“You’re an idiot,” Eren scoffs, pushing me back onto the couch easily. I bristle, some of the fight returning to me, but he’s already turning to jog up the stairs. “Make him come to you.”

Marco smiles at me good-naturedly, combing his fingers through my disgusting, sweaty hair. I need a shower. “It’s the least he can do, right?”

I shake my head, looking at the ground. We’re not even close to even. My wounds will heal, and if I’m lucky, they’ll behave themselves. Armin’s fucked for life.

Eren comes back downstairs, dragging a morose, gaunt-looking Armin behind him. The blonde’s hair is shaggy and tangled in his face, like he hadn’t washed or brushed or even touched it since he came out of the jail. Which is entirely likely. Eren drags him over to a stop in front of me, and as his eyes fall on the swath of bandages covering my thigh, he sinks to his knees.

I adjust the blanket covering me. Leaning forward, I take his face in my cold hands, bringing his gaze back to my face. The despair in his bright eyes is killing me. They look just like they did that day, so bloodshot and dark underneath. The dull color brings out the brilliance of his blue irises. His eyes fill with tears. He bites his lip against the coming tide of sobs, but I just shift toward him more and pull his face into my stomach.

He lets go.

Armin clutches at my shirt and holds me close to him as he sobs uncontrollably into my stomach. He’s trying to spit out words, to no avail. I just wrap my arms around his shoulders and lean down to press light kisses along his scalp. He tastes like dirt, and a little like blood.

Levi and Eren watch, faces some mixture of pity and concern. Marco seems to have left the room at some point. I run my nails soothingly over Armin’s back and shush him when he tries to choke out apologies, to me and Mikasa and Eren and everyone else. He repeats her name over and over, and every time he does I remember the sound she’d made when he’d sunk his teeth into her little shoulder. 

I run my fingers into his tangled hair, gathering it up into a matted ponytail, just trying to get it out of the way so I can rub the back of his neck. The gesture always calms him down. It’s going to take a little more than brief physical contact to bring Armin out of this, though. If he ever recovers.

Eren slides down behind Armin and scoots forward until he’s pressed against his thin back, legs sprawled on either side of him. He wraps his arms around Armin’s waist and rests his forehead against the blonde’s shoulder. 

We lose track of the time like this. Eventually Armin calms down, his sobs dying down into little whimpers, his face and eyes bright red. I bury my face in his hair once more, peppering his head with little kisses, until he tilts his head to look up at me.

The pain in my chest is gone, I notice.

I reach down and wipe tears off of his cheeks with my thumbs. He leans into the touch.

When he opens his mouth to ask me a question, I see the black stitches in his tongue. He notices my look of vague horror and shakes his head. _‘I deserve at least this much,’_ his expression says. I’m not really sure I want to see the matching set under his chin, deep between his jawbones, even if it’s probably shrunken down to less than an inch. The idea just kind of makes my balls hurt sympathetically.

Marco really did a number.

Eren nuzzles into the back of Armin’s head, squeezing him closer, and I squint down at the little wolf. He tilts his head in question. “Are you mad?” The question comes out before I’ve even half finished considering it, but there it is.

He blinks, then shakes his head again, one hand coming to drag carefully down the bandages on my thigh.

Marco comes back downstairs, moving to stand next to Levi. He watches the three of us with a blank expression. I drop my handful of Armin’s hair and lean back against the couch. Marco’s face relaxes a little, but I can already see him connecting the dots. I let him, holding his gaze until he moves it to the carpet, silently losing our staring contest.

I go back to sleep for a while after Marco forces some strange soup concoction down my throat. Something about needing to eat, blah blah blah.

When I wake up again, I’m alone in the basement, staring up at the ceiling. Goddamn elevators again. With nothing to distract me, the details of my dream are clearer, closer to my grasp. The white elevator surrounding us, Marco’s nervous expression, the lit-up ring around the button glaring at me like an eye from the board. The lights flickering, the panicked, ragged quality my breaths take on, the black handprint smeared along the metal door—

“You’re awake?”

I jump. The movement tugs my stitches. Fuck these things, they’re driving me apeshit already. I sit up and peer over the back of the couch, looking over at Marco. The ugly tan couch sits dead in the middle of Eren’s basement, for whatever fucking reason, and the stairs to the upper level lie against the wall a few feet behind. Marco’s sitting on the stairs, a newspaper spread across his thighs. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

“How’d you tell?”

“You started breathing harder.” He sighs and stands, coming around the couch to sit on the floor in front of me. I roll onto my side carefully to face him. “Were you dreaming?”

“Yeah,” I breathe, patting at my stomach in search of my smokes. Marco pulls them out of his own hoodie pocket and slides one between his lips. He lights it with the Zippo, and instead of coughing like he had in the truck, Marco smoothly exhales a stream of smoke at the ceiling and places the cigarette between my lips. I raise my eyebrows but don’t comment, inhaling deeply.

I roll onto my back again and puff smoke at the ceiling. “You don’t look so hot.”

He hangs his head and scratches his cheek. He looks absolutely fucked, and not in the good way. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He toys with the carpet for a few moments before speaking softly. “Was Armin your ex?”

Blinking at him, I take another drag. He’s not looking up at me, so I mumble, “Yeah.”

He nods, and stays silent for a few moments, hands resting loosely in his lap. My chest hurts. I ignore it. 

“What did I miss?”

This time, his response is marginally livelier. He rakes his fingers through his hair with a sigh. “Eren and Levi had a shouting match over some apocalypse or another, Armin locked himself in the guest room, Erwin came around once or twice to make sure you weren’t dead, and Eren’s been at the hospital at all hours of the day and night to visit Mikasa. He says she’s going to be released in a day or so. Armin’s freaking out about it. You’ve just mostly been passed out, not like I can blame you.” He gives a weak smile. “You lost a lot of blood. I thought you were gonna… you know.”

I laugh, the sound coming out around a cloud of smoke. “I’m tougher than that. Takes more than a few scratches to get rid of me.”

Raising his eyebrow, Marco leans over and gently pokes me in the ribs. “You have four gashes across your butt that are each an inch deep and two or three feet long. They gave a valiant effort.”

I just huff, reaching back to put out my cigarette, and Marco leans forward to rest his chin on the couch. He looks exhausted. With Levi and Eren in the bedroom, Armin in the guest bed, and me on the couch, I realize that there’s not a whole lot of sleep-able real estate around here. “Where have you been sleeping?”

He shrugs. I raise my eyebrows. “You… have been sleeping, right?”

A sheepish half-smile. My eyes widen. “Are you fucking stupid? It’s been like a week since you slept last, dude.”

“If I’m not tired, then I’m not tired.”

I pin him with a glare and sit up. He’s protesting, but I’m not listening, moving gingerly to sit at the edge of the couch. I gesture to the rest of the sofa, more than enough room for him to curl up.

“You need rest more than I do.”

Grimacing, I wrap the blanket around my waist and stand carefully. The soup and water and cigarettes really did wonders. “I need a shower,” I grouse, already limping awkwardly toward the small basement bathroom tucked in the back corner. He doesn’t listen to me, hurrying around me into the bathroom to start the shower. 

“Don’t scrub your stitches, some of them aren’t that good, they might come out,” he mumbles, reaching in to test the water with his hand. I roll my eyes.

“Alright, Mother Goose, get out. Go sleep.”

He straightens up out of the shower and turns to look at me, and right about now I’m cursing how tiny this bathroom is, because there’s definitely not enough space between us. I let out a slow breath, trying to be subtle, but it’s impossible to look away from him. Especially when his face is softening, and he’s moving closer to me, standing over me by just a few inches, our faces far, far too close, and I see that perfect little line of freckles across the bridge of his nose again, and we’re close enough that our breath mingles between us.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

But I can’t stop staring up at him. His eyes are tired, dark, mismatched, but there’s something behind them, and I want to keep staring at him until it comes out. He’s moving closer, too close, too close. I flick my eyes down to his lips just as his tongue darts out the tiniest bit to wet them. This isn’t how this is supposed to be. 

My hands are shaking.

I feel like crying.

The pain in my chest is too much.

I turn away from him, clearing my throat, and make an attempt at normalcy. “Scoot, Padre, I haven’t shat in days.”

He snorts. “You’ve been around Levi too much.”

“I’ve been unconscious!” I’m pouting a little, but I can’t help it. I can’t help the smile tugging at the corner of my lips, either, and the combination must look ridiculous.

Marco just laughs. He reaches up and delicately tugs the bandage off my forehead, leaning close to take a look at the nice chunk of flesh taken out of my brow. I wonder if it’s gonna make a cool scar. Marco tosses the bandage into the little trash and closes me in the bathroom. I try to pretend I don’t notice the look he gives me before he shuts the door.

I sigh shakily.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

The war between moody self-loathing and crying like a bitch is decided when I lean my forehead against the cool tile, water pounding against my back, and I have to bite my tongue against the sobs that try to come out.

I’m suddenly very sympathetic for Armin’s extended wailing. Generally, I try not to cry, being as I’m a grown-ass man, but you know what? Sometimes you just have to stand in the shower and blow your feelings out against the wall. No better place to do it than in here, where the water should be just loud enough to cover the gasping sounds that I can’t contain. 

It takes a while to get it all out. By that time, my remaining bandages are soaked, and I peel them off gingerly. They get tossed out of the shower and cease to matter in my mind.

Marco’s right. These things are huge. I’m going to have monstrous scars curling up my thigh and over my right ass cheek. I’m sure someone will find them attractive, though. There are always cute and slightly insane girls with scar kinks, and I’ve always been good at making up stories. I sigh again. The whole denial thing is starting to come apart, despite my best efforts.

I know the cost of admitting it to myself, though. Especially with the way Marco’s been looking at me. The gazes lingering a little too long, the way he places himself as near to me as he can, the towering jealousy he’d exuded whenever Armin came anywhere within ten feet of me…

The water runs over my face, washing away dirt and sweat and scum. I work a good amount of soap through my hair and wonder if I can use that to my advantage.

Marco doesn’t have to know that when we’re all in a room together, the only one I want to be near, the only one I want to hold close to me is him. He doesn’t need to know that I was just there as a sort of mother hen to get Armin to unload his self-loathing, his guilt, his internal screams. Once he got it all out, neither of us were thinking about each other anymore. If we even had been to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Armin. I loved him crazy. When he got turned, it killed both of us. I stewed under the weight of it for years and pushed him away for his own safety, afraid of what would happen. On the other side of the same coin, I pined after him, blowing through girl after girl to try and fill the hole. Not admirable, I know. Not even fucking close. Now I can’t even remember any of their names.

The soap has long been washed off, and I could have gotten out ages ago, but I linger under the water, trying to see if it can wash the ‘ginormous douchebag’ feeling off of me as well.

No such luck.

I sigh and kill the water, reaching out to grab a towel.

My clothes are pretty much forsaken at this point, as usual, so I just roll out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around my waist. I limp over to the couch and look down at Marco, who’s passed the fuck out in a little ball, his face pressed into the gross pillow I’d been sweating all over for days. I wrinkle my nose and yank it out from under his head.

He groans and reaches out for me, his hand hooking around my good thigh. He tugs me closer and rolls onto his stomach, the world’s grumpiest frown crossing over his face. I can’t help but laugh. Reaching over, I grab the other (ideally less grody) pillow and drop it on his head. He doesn’t move. After a few seconds, his fingers go lax, and soft snoring echoes up from under the pillow. Typical.

He’ll probably sleep for a week, I think to myself, moving to the stairs with a groan and a limp. Fuck my leg. Is it healed yet?

The stairs are a nightmare. A horrible nightmare. I may or may not be bleeding again by the time I haul myself to the top, towel doing a haphazard job of covering me.

Eren, Levi, and Armin are sitting in the kitchen, and they turn to look at me as I make my noisy ascent. Armin’s eyes are bloodshot again. I notice then that Mikasa is there too, looking about as normal as always, and my face turns bright red. I reach up to cover my pierced nipples. Like it matters.

Mikasa stares at me, then moves her gaze back to Armin. She reaches over with one hand and laces their fingers together, her other hand already occupied by Eren’s. He leans his head down against her hand, and I’m reminded of the scene in Target, my forehead pressed to his delicate fingers.

I sigh. Levi stands and bustles me out of the room, jogging up the stairs like a champ just to be an ass. I groan and follow, not looking back into the kitchen.

“She’s okay, then?”

Levi shrugs, digging out some of Eren’s clothes that might not fall off of me. I politely decline his underwear. Commando sucks, but it’s better than Eren’s boxers. I sit on the edge of their bed and carefully bind up my thigh again, now that it’s dry. Levi has the good grace to help me with my ass bandages, making no comment on my piercings, if he’s even looking. 

I pull on Eren’s pants carefully, trying not to stretch the stitches on my hip too much. This whole thing sucks. “Is she…” I look up at him. He’s looking at the dresser, arms folded. “You know.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

I look at the ground, sitting back on the bed, my hands hanging loose in my lap. Just as I’m running a hand through my hair, my mouth opening to curse my ineptitude, Levi gives me a stern look. “Don’t. You did the best you could, and it’s more than most people could do without shitting themselves.”

Shaking my head, I smile a little, but the movement is brief and shallow. “Marco did so much more. If not for him, she and I would both be dead.”

Levi shrugs. I look up at him.

Suddenly, I’m a little suspicious.

“Why are you so interested in him?”

He gives me a side-eye, silent for a few moments, before sighing. “You know Hanji?”

I think really hard. If it’s the person I’m thinking of, then yeah. Big weirdo, but there’s no better loremaster in the whole damned country. Maybe the world. That person’s kind of a nutter butter, but that’s the price one pays for brilliance, I guess. I nod.

“They think he has some part to play in something big.” 

“You mean that apocalypse? Apocalypses aren’t real, man.”

Levi shrugs. “It may not be full-scale, but something big is coming, and it’s not going to be fun. Hanji’s in the process of figuring it out. All we know is that it involves the priest and the rift in his church. They keep spewing some crazy shit about ‘titans,’ too, but usually everything after that is some mix of Norwegian and gurgling, so I stopped listening.”

I raise my eyebrows, thinking of the thing in the factory, the giant towering high through the fog. Sounds an awful lot like a titan. I open my mouth to say so, but Levi’s already shaking his head.

“Not like that. Hanji says they’d be closer to human-sized, maybe a little bigger. We’re thinking that the library thing was one of them.”

Shuddering, I pull on Eren’s shirt and smooth it over my stomach. It’s a little baggy, but just about the right height. Makes Eren seem like a midget. “I’d rather not have to face them again. Don’t like how they get in my damn head.”

Levi turns and marches down the hall, heading back to the kitchen without giving me a response. Guess that conversation’s over. I’m not mad, though. Any more and I think I’d start losing it. I’ve never been good at keeping my facts straight about the end of the world, so luckily it’s never happened before.

I wobble down the stairs, wave at the cuddle-fest happening in the kitchen, and continue back into my dark lair. Marco’s still unconscious under the pillow. I move it off his face so he can at least breathe or something, and he mutters something in his sleep in response. He really looks like he’d been about at the end of his rope. I pull the blanket from the back of the couch over him. Always falling asleep without covering up. Good way to get sick.

A brief foray into Eren’s horrifying closet yields two dusty sleeping bags. I whack them a little and set them up next to the couch, sinking onto my stomach with a disgruntled series of curses. I pull a thin sheet over myself, another liberation from the closet, and turn to lay on my good side. I look up at Marco’s squished, peaceful face. His hair is falling into his eye a bit. I reach up and brush it aside, but it just falls right back.

My chest hurts.

My fingers trail down his freckled, bruised arm, a product of the lifestyle he lives now. My fingers wrap around his for just a moment, squeezing, before I yank my hand under the sheet and flop onto my stomach.

I fall asleep after what feels like hours of contemplating, buck-passing, guilt, and incredibly gruesome ‘what-if’ scenarios, dreaming fitfully of faulty elevators, nervous glances, and the feeling of falling.


	7. Cross My Heart, Hope To Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marco, I'm sorry. I fucked things up again. What do I do? Marco...
> 
> Is it dark where you go?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so before the process of lighting the author on fire begins, i'd like you to know:  
> \- [i have a tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)  
> \- if you follow me on tumblr, sometimes i post side stories for ghost story based on creature prompts people send (but mostly i just troll)  
> \- you can also check the tag #tipsforjean, if you only want to see the vignettes and not me being obnoxious
> 
> and lastly...  
> \- this chapter hurt me too.

I jolt awake just before we hit the ground, eyes wide, and immediately look around my unfamiliar surroundings. My heart pounds. My ass hurts. My thoughts are running a mile a minute until I remember that I’m on the floor of Eren’s basement and there’s nothing here that’s going to eat me.

Well, theoretically. That’s probably very dependent upon what day it is.

I wince a little. The stitches in my thigh are incredibly sore and bordering on itchy. I just rub my hand over my thigh through my pants and sigh. Marco’s still breathing deeply next to me. Swear to god, he hasn’t moved an inch since I tucked him in. At least I know he’s alive, based on the occasional soft snore.

Running a hand through my hair, I look around the dark basement. The view outside the slim windows near the ceiling seems to be pitch-black. What day is it, even? What time? How long have I been completely out of the loop?

I fumble around until I find my cigarettes, still in Marco’s hoodie, and light one with a good inhale. It’s the first time in days that the rush doesn’t make my head spin. That can only be a good sign. Flopping onto my back, I smoke lazily and stare at Eren’s ceiling. 

“You know,” comes Eren’s cocky voice from behind the couch. I turn to look up at him. “I have a tent if you wanna go camping so bad.”

I give him the finger. He just laughs and comes around to sit next to me on the floor. I let him steal one of my cigarettes without giving him any shit for it. I figure it’ll make up for the couch. Then again, that thing’s an ugly piece of shit, I probably did him a favor by bleeding all over it.

Eren pulls the ashtray across the carpet between us and leans back on his hands, idly wiggling his cigarette between his lips.

“You aren’t, uh…” I lick my lips and pause. He flicks his gaze down onto me, waiting for me to continue with a raised eyebrow. “You know.”

He blinks. “Pissed?”

I nod. He sighs.

“Of course I’m fucking pissed, ass monkey.” He pulls his cigarette out to ash it in the glass dish between us, and I mimic the motion, avoiding his stare. “I could have been helping. I could have been doing something, you know?”

I blow smoke out through my nose and dig the heel of my palm into my eye. The bruises under my eyes haven’t healed yet, and my nose twinges irately. I’m just getting more and more handsome as the week goes on, I swear. “Eren,” I start, but he’s already rolling his eyes. I power forward. “Dude, this life isn’t for fun. I do it because no one else will. Levi does what he does because it helps him sleep at night. Armin… Armin got sucked into it, and by proxy so did Mikasa. Marco, too.” I look up at him then, acutely aware of the priest’s slow, easy breathing behind me. “And I wouldn’t wish this on any one of them.”

He watches me carefully, considering me, piping smoke toward the ceiling. His eyes move behind me then, and I look at the carpet. 

After a while, Eren reaches forward and puts out his cigarette. “Well, I know now. No going back.”

I nod, sucking down the last of my own cigarette before digging it into the mountain of filters sticking up from the glass. 

Very true. No going back.

Not for any of us.

Marco shifts on the couch behind me, and a dull anxiety creeps into my gut.

\--

The plan is to drive south for a few hours, to a city called Rose. There, somewhere in the humanities building at Rose U, hiding behind a stack of books in the biological anthropology labs in the basement, Dr. Hanji Zoe does underground research on how the world ends.

This person exists almost outside the realm of normal human understanding. They see the world in a different color, a different space, a different time. What hides between the lines of the obvious is plain as day to Hanji, and the hints lurking in the shadows of every doubt are written exclusively in their language.

Hanji has seen the world end a hundred different ways, a thousand different times, in countless different timelines. Nothing is invisible to them, nothing is unlikely, and nothing is surprising. 

Whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper, Hanji will have already seen it, and they’ll just laugh and jump again into the darkness.

Sorry, this is not to say that Hanji is immortal or anything stupid like that. I guess maybe I should have explained them a little better. 

Dr. Hanji Zoe is a late-30s genderless blob of a human being whose only goal in life is to stay in academia until the system collapses onto itself. Even then they’ll probably at least keep the bio-anthro department going for another decade or two by willpower alone.

No, nothing aside from sheer brilliance, insurmountable stubbornness, and something approaching psychosis allows Hanji to see these things. They’ve always been able to see things other people haven’t, kind of like Levi. The difference here is that Levi is a telephone and Hanji is a little kid in front of a ninety-foot high LED billboard, _Blade Runner_ style, rapidly flicking through the advertisements until they have it memorized.

The car ride is boring. Marco and I already did the whole road-trip bonding thing, so I sprawl in the back seat with my head leaned against the window, drifting in and out of sleep. Marco looks out his window, and Erwin and Levi in the front are silent.

Levi won’t let me look at the book. I guess the boredom is really getting to my head if I’m trying to touch that sticky sack of shit again, all smelly even through a towel and a plastic bag on the center console between the old men up front. My phone is MIA, Marco’s phone only has Snake, I didn’t bring any books or work or anything… I’m about going out of my mind.

“Are we there yet?”

Yeah. I fucking went there. Fight me.

Marco peers over at me with an exasperated look, and I just adjust the pillow under me that serves to ease some of the pressure on my ass stitches. Sometimes I’m really upset that I have such a bony butt, and this is one of those times, because every single one of those damn stitches is on fire. The itching may very well be taking over my mind.

It’s Monday. I think.

“Marco,” I mumble, leaning my chin in my palm and watching bare trees fly by outside.

“Mm?”

“What happened with the church yesterday?”

The priest runs a hand through his hair. “A backup took over for me.”

“You have backup priests?”

“Yeah, I keep them in the storage closet in case I need to go on a sudden soul-searching journey with a rag-tag team of Scooby-Doo dropouts,” he says with an admirably straight face. My eyebrows shoot up. He holds the poker face.

My god, the sass.

Eventually Marco’s straight face cracks and he straight up _giggles_. I just shake my head and look back out the window, unable to help the smile spreading across my face.

Dammit.

The rain starts somewhere around four, maybe halfway through our journey. Once we’d gotten a good ways outside of Trost, the air had warmed up considerably, weirdly even. Ten degrees in Trost, sixty degrees everywhere else. More reasons to relocate, if you ask me. That’s some horse shit.

Erwin just turns on his windshield wipers and slows down, which drives me fucking apeshit. Can’t say I blame him, though, not with the way it’s coming down out there. It’s a straight up deluge that floods the interstate. I steal Marco’s phone and grumpily play Snake until it becomes mind-numbing. Even then, we’re still not there.

Road trips suck and I hate them and by the time I’m done reimagining every cheesy horror movie I’ve ever seen, Erwin’s sliding off the freeway toward Rose U. Marco hasn’t spoken in a long while. He just stares out the window at the buckets of rain. It’s eerie, how still he’s able to stay for so long. I never could do that. I’m a fidgeter.

Erwin stops outside the ancient humanities building and Levi, Marco, and I pour out of the car and run (or hobble) into the lobby, which smells weirdly like Froot Loops. A mopey security guard looks at us, then back down at his phone, completely uninterested in whether or not we belong there. Probably for the better.

We take the dingy elevator down two floors, to the very bottom level where they hide weirdos like Hanji. The doors open on what appears to be some kind of messy post-apocalypse.

“… Levi,” I start, but he’s already leaving the elevator and stepping out onto the loose floor tiles. 

I sigh. God fucking dammit.

The lower basement is… well, it’s about as promising as it sounds. There are only a few working lights flickering in the tile-less ceiling, insulation clouding around the humming vents above a latticework of cheap metal that makes up the ceiling. The light coming off of them is yellow, hazy, and it seems like the wiring is probably at the end of its life, based on the way electricity keeps snapping above the lights.

Most of the basement we step out into is separated from us by a long, rusty chain-link fence, shelves full of whatever the fuck it is anthropologists do moving back across the huge room in cramped rows. The door to this area is chained and padlocked, which is ever-so-promising. Blue painter’s tape arrows point us along the impromptu hallway. The tiles aren’t sealed to the floor, so like the princess and the pea, every little pile of crap under them makes each step wobbly and unsteady. The walls are either naked drywall, marked measurements in pencil scattered around haphazardly, or just bare studs bracketing off dark rooms. 

Marco and I look at each other. His face is tight, not that I can blame him. I’m pretty sure my butt cheeks are clenched as tight as they can possibly be.

We scurry to keep up with Levi, who’s striding down these creepy, dingy hallways like he owns them. The path he takes is winding and nonsensical, but every other option is either ‘fuck-that’ dark or tied off with caution tape. Better deal with the cards we’re dealt.

Eventually we come across an open, intact door, with a little faux-wood plaque that reads ‘H. ZOE’ in cracked white paint. 

We find the loremaster, as predicted, about ears-deep in a million different texts, mumbling quietly, the crumpled remains of coffee cups and soda cans strewn everywhere. Levi stiffens visibly, a somewhat horrified expression spreading over his face. I’m trying really hard not to chortle at his expense. Mostly because I’m very sure that the slap he would deliver to my stitches could give me a seizure.

An ass scoots backwards out from under Hanji’s desk. It appears to belong to a scruffy, mousy-looking blonde dude, who sits back on his heels and rakes his hands harshly through his mussed hair. He reaches under the desk and pulls out a half-full trash bag. I can only assume the contents are a continuation of the mess on the desk.

“O-oh!” He turns to us, tired eyes widening, and struggles to his feet. “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

Levi stares at him, not responding, and moves around the desk to Hanji’s side. The professor doesn’t seem to notice his presence. They just continue to mutter, scrawling messy notes in a thick notebook, the pen in their other hand drawing lines and short reminders under important passages in a fat reference book. 

Grousing, Levi pulls the plastic bag out of his messenger bag and dumps it across what Hanji’s doing, forcing them to pay attention. Huge brown eyes blink a few times from behind thick glasses.

“Hey, thanks!” They put their pens down and move to grab the bag, but Levi grabs their thin wrist.

“Don’t you have gloves?”

Hanji smiles widely and wiggles their fingers at Levi, the tips stained dark with old ink. Guess not. Levi shudders and steps back a few feet.

The skittish blonde watches Hanji closely, chewing on his lip. “Professor, maybe I should run upstairs—”

“I don’t want to owe that scrub Nile. Don’t bother, Moblit, I’ll be fine.” Hanji grins, showing all of their teeth, and the blonde (Moblit, whatever kind of name that is) quakes a little in his boots.

I raise an eyebrow at him. He must be Hanji’s new grad student. Poor fucker.

Just as Hanji’s shaking hands pull reverently at the towel still covering the book, the already lame lights overhead shut off with a loud _snap_. I jump, knees bending, wishing that I had thought to bring a knife or something. 

I can feel Marco next to me, tense, his hands coming up to feel around until they grab at the back of my hoodie. I move closer, standing in front of him.

Hanji switches on a flashlight duct-taped to a trophy on their desk and continues on as if nothing had happened. Moblit’s sighing again, moving to clean the shit off the top of Hanji’s desk. 

“Hanji, what the fuck,” Levi grumbles, voicing what all of us are thinking.

Blinking again, Hanji looks up at the ceiling and thinks for a moment. “Oh, they’re remodeling down here. Sometimes that happens.”

I stare. Marco peers warily over my shoulder. Remodeling my ass. “Shouldn’t you, you know,” I stand down and move away from Marco, stuffing my hands in my pockets. He reluctantly lets go of my shirt. “Take your shit somewhere else while they knock down half the building?”

Moblit gives me a desperate, pleading look while Hanji ignores me and goes back to gently unwrapping and opening the _Edda_. I guess Moblit’s already tried all variations of that suggestion, with obvious results.

Just as the burning smell coming off the pages hits my nose, I hear a sharp whine coming from behind me. I turn to look at Marco, who’s looking down at his pocket, confused. 

I recognize that sound.

It’s the same sound my phone had made right after the car wreck in Jinae. My heart skips a beat. Marco frowns and pulls his phone out, smacking it against his palm.

The whining grows louder, grittier, stabbing its way into my brain through my ears as painfully as possible. I cover my ears and wince. Marco’s face is drawn into a pained expression, one hand moving to cover his ear, the other jamming the phone’s power button ineffectually.

I want to grab the damn thing and fucking chuck it. The sound is grating, itching in my brain, making me so _angry_ , and it’s only by virtue of Marco hitting the breaking point before I do that the screaming phone doesn’t get jammed under a floor tile and crushed out of existence. He rips the thing’s battery out and holds the parts far away from each other. The phone’s screen flashes, the crackling sound dipping into lower frequencies a few times before it dies out with what almost sounds like a gasping hum.

My skin still crawling, I pull my hands away from my head. The ringing left behind in my brain isn’t enough to cover the feeling of something writhing around between my ears. I shake my head and smack at my ear once or twice. Marco puts his phone and the battery into different pockets and rubs his hands down his face. He’s pale and a little sweaty.

When I turn back to the trio by the desk to ask what the fuck was up with that, they’re all poring over the ancient, scribbled-on tome like nothing is amiss.

A chill runs down my spine. I turn slowly back to Marco, and his eyes meet mine, wide and confused. The look we exchange translates into something like ‘better not bring this up.’

Hanji’s rambling stream of consciousness is only in English about ten percent of the time, and of the other languages they choose, I can only understand bits and pieces. Both Moblit and Levi are nodding, though, with Levi looking pissier and pissier and Moblit looking more and more like he’s considering changing professions. Good luck, buddy.

I look around Hanji’s lab. Theirs is one that hasn’t gotten crappy drywall yet, so plastic wrap weaves around the studs up to the ceiling to make an impromptu divider. I can see people moving blurrily on the other side, and I really hope it’s construction workers. Then again, I kind of doubt that anything even approaching supernatural would want to stay around Hanji long, for fear of being dissected.

Attempting to ignore the unholy smell permeating the room, I move over to Hanji’s desk. The book is old, undeniably, and in the margins and around the figures and between the lines, someone took notes. Extensive notes. It looks like it would be enough to fill another like-sized book. Black ink, blue ink, a little red ink, the tiny little serial-killer-style scribbles fill every empty space left to them.

Hanji flips through the pages slowly, brilliant eyes scanning, memorizing. As they move through the pages, the tiny handwriting gets sloppier, messier, more frantic. There are passages where the scrawls turn psychotic, written over the words and lined over again and again until they make a deep indent in the page. It looks like something you’d pull out of an insane asylum. Chills roll up my spine just looking at it.

“Hey, Hanji,” I mumble, and they blink up at me, surprisingly attentive. “What is this, exactly?”

“The _Edda_ is a collection of Norse folk myths,” they start, pointing at something on the page with one hand as they rifle through the reference book with the other. “This one didn’t come from our plane.”

“What, like an alternate universe?”

“Something like that,” they mumble, picking up a pen with their left hand to make another note in their book. They move through the pages again, occasionally stopping to stare blankly at it for a while. The whole time, they mumble quickly, and I know better than to ask what they’re thinking. At this stage, I won’t understand it anyway. Hanji needs time to translate their thoughts to something consumable by lesser beings. Moblit seems to be picking some things up, though, because he’s occasionally nodding and biting his lip.

Marco lingers next to me, just as confused as I am. He looks around the room, still shrouded in darkness, and his hand moves up again to grab at the hem of my hoodie. Wordlessly, I let him.

Hanji suddenly yells and bolts up out of their chair, jamming their finger into a completely illegible scrawl wedged between two lines. They point at it again, once or twice, yelling at Moblit in what sounds like a mix of Greek and Norwegian, and he stares back at them.

Levi’s eyes widen on the other side of Marco. I look at him curiously, his eyes moving from Moblit to Hanji. There’s a tense pause before the psychic turns very calmly towards us. Marco takes a step back.

Then I realize all three of them are looking at us. I’m starting to sweat. I take a step back, crowding Marco behind me, and move to where I can watch all three of them at once.

I wish I had a weapon. Anything. A broom would do.

“We’re gonna need a translation,” I mumble, looking between them.

Hanji sighs and looks back to the _Edda_ , mumbling to themselves. Moblit moves to a bookshelf to grab another few heavy, ancient tomes. Levi hasn’t stopped staring at us, eyes narrowed. I straighten up and stare right back, hands curling into fists.

Taking the books from Moblit, Hanji moves into full-on research mode. They’re basically unreachable at this point, for who knows how long. It’s on Moblit to make sure Hanji doesn’t die of starvation or something.

“Levi,” I start, glaring in his direction. “Do not make me steal another car. Tell us what’s going on.”

Levi sighs. He turns to Moblit. “Are the smoke detectors connected?”

“N-no, why?”

Levi’s already lighting a cigarette and raking a hand through his hair. He doesn’t bother to respond. Instead, he turns to me and exhales slowly. “I was right,” he starts. “It’s something big.”

“… Thanks for the clarification.”

“You can back down. We won’t dissect the priest.”

“Speak for yourself,” Moblit mumbles, glancing nervously at Hanji. Levi raises his eyebrows minutely, then nods his head as if to say, ‘Good point.’ 

I don’t back down. Marco’s hand is still fisted in my hoodie.

Levi closes his eyes and rubs his fingers across his brow. “Hanji thinks it’s Ragnarok.”

I stare at him. Hard. “Ragnarok.” Levi looks up at me again, a frown spreading deeper into his features. “Like, _Ragnarok_. The Norse cleansing of man.”

“The same.”

Burying my face in my hands, I quash the urge to kick something. As much as I really want to. I breathe deeply, in and out, in and out, until I’m calm again. “We’re missing some steps here. I’ve already seen what they think is a titan, right?”

Levi sighs and nods. “Yeah. The fire giants.”

Moblit comes to join us, flipping through a small notebook. “It’s been far too warm, too,” he says idly, looking between me and Levi. I notice that he doesn’t spare a glance for Marco. I don’t like Moblit. He continues anyway. “There’s also the fact that none of the other gods have started their parts. Even Surt’s still asleep, even though his whole realm is waking up around him. Muspelheim is crawling with those things.”

“How do you know?” Maybe I’m being a little unfair, but I spit the question at him anyway. 

He points at Hanji. “The book says so.”

“Dude, that thing is _ancient_. It could have been sitting there for three damn cycles by now.”

Moblit shakes his head and flips through his notebook again. “No, that’s just the chemical composition of the conduit it came through. Those notes were written over the last year or so by a necromancer closer to Muspelheim than we are. I think… Hanji said her name was Ilse.”

“So why did she FedEx it over now? Why’s this so important all of a sudden?”

“Because,” Levi interjects, blowing smoke up into Moblit’s face on accident. Maybe. “It’s too early, and the _eldjötnar_ are moving too fast.” He stops again to rub at the bridge of his nose. I wonder if he’s got a migraine forming. “They’re already coming up here, but they’re… disorganized. Unsure. Whatever’s leading them, it shouldn’t be.”

I squint, trying to mull this over in my head. “What does Hanji think it is?”

“They’re not sure,” Moblit sighs, “But they think it’s something from another pantheon. Another part of the universe entirely, intruding on this timeline and messing with the threads. It’s out of its own cycle, whatever it is, and that’s why it’s so chaotic.”

“And what does this have to do with Marco?”

Levi and Moblit both tense. Marco’s still behind me, and he sucks in a short breath. 

After a while, Levi lights another cigarette, having ground his out on the floor a while ago. I hold my hand out, and he hands me the pack and the lighter. He waits until I’ve lit and inhaled to speak again.

“Their door isn’t open yet. So they need another way through.”

My hand pauses between us, outstretched. Levi takes his pack from my shaking fingers. I take another deep inhale to calm myself before I start screaming.

“They’re disorganized,” Moblit says, echoing Levi’s earlier words. “They’re fumbling, trying to make it through, but they can only make it through one at a time. Right now, if Hanji’s reading that right, they’re using spirits. In order to get a head start on Ragnarok, there needs to be a lot of them. So they need a, uh…”

Levi spews smoke again in an annoyed huff. “Whatever’s leading them is making some kind of moronic macaroni art Trojan Horse, and they’re gonna shove it right up Marco’s ass.” He pauses. I stare. “We think.”

Marco, behind me, is breathing pretty shallowly. I turn to look at him. He looks like he’s about to faint. I’d offer him a smoke, but I’m pretty sure the nicotine would actually knock him out. Turning back to the others, I sigh and rake a hand through my hair. “Why him? What’s he got that’s so special?”

It sounds mean, but I’m really trying to give Marco an out. I can think of a thousand reasons he’s special. I’ll keep that bullshit to myself.

“We don’t know that either. It’s the best we have, though,” Moblit says, and he’s damn lucky he keeps talking or I would have been screaming in his face already. “But the rift opened up in his church, right? And the titans started coming up in his hometown. Right now he’s the only link between Jinae and this whole mess.”

“You’re telling me none of the residents of Jinae were dabbling in the dark arts?”

Moblit stares at me, confused. “They’re all dead,” he says simply, and my jaw drops a little. Ice spreads through my veins. Somewhere, I knew that already, but… shit. I turn to look at Marco again. “No one can track down anyone who lived in Jinae before the factory went up. Marco’s the only one left.”

I could just punch this scrawny bitch right in his stupid face. I take a deep breath and rub my hands over my face. Marco just steps back until he hits the doorway and slides down it to the floor. Not that I blame him.

Tearing my eyes away from Marco, I feel the rage cool off and a renewed purpose take its place. “So what do we do?”

Levi shrugs. “Wait for Hanji to decode Ilse’s notes.”

“There’s nothing in the meantime?”

“Not unless you wanna fuck things up more than they already are, no.”

I sigh again. This sucks. Hard.

“There is something,” a faint voice calls out from behind a pile of books. We all turn to look at Hanji, who doesn’t look up from their notes. “Ilse had another journal that she sent a few years ago, just after the factory.”

“Great,” I say, ready for a distraction. “Where is it?”

“Someone bought it.”

“Right, who?”

“Dot Pixis.”

Levi groans and runs a hand through his hair. I would mimic the gesture, but the overwhelming sense of ‘ugh’ swarming over me prevents any motion that isn’t rolling my eyes. Moblit looks between us, confused.

Dot Pixis is a devilishly intelligent, incredibly patient, and soul-crushingly annoying collector based in central Trost. He buys things having to do with the supernatural, anything that’s made its way into this world that shouldn’t be here. Then he keeps them in glass cases in his insanely posh condo at the top of a skyscraper and makes our lives miserable any time we need something from him.

‘Eccentric’ is the word I usually hear describing him. ‘Knows how to play games’ is more what I would go for. The shit I’ve had to do in exchange for the spiritual equivalent of heavy artillery, man, I’ve never had worse jobs. Especially the manticore. Fuck the manticore. I remember that shit, and I still hold it against him like it’s my job.

Overall, I would probably say that he’s harmless, though.

That’s probably the soothing way he talks. You don’t realize exactly what you signed up for until it’s staring you in the face. And usually, dripping. 

“So we just have to go get it, right?”

Hanji nods absently, messy brown hair falling into their eyes. Moblit moves toward them, pulling a bobby pin out of the depths of his slacks, and pins Hanji’s hair away from their eyes. Though the doctor doesn’t seem to notice, there’s an incredibly minute pause in the scratching of their pen that spreads a wide smile over Moblit’s face. I turn away, unable to take this tender bullshit, and look down at Marco.

“How’s it going, Padre?”

He looks up at me, and the look he gives me kind of stabs me in the gut. I kneel carefully in front of him, mindful of my stitches, and sit on my heels. “I’m… I’m the door?”

“We don’t know for sure,” I mumble in my best attempt at a soothing voice. 

As he opens his mouth to protest, Levi comes to stand next to us. “It’s just a theory, priest. Don’t run crazy with it yet.” Levi drops his pack to me again and I gratefully take and light another cigarette. All this end-of-the-world crap is driving me to chain-smoke. 

I turn to Moblit again. “What’s in this other journal?”

Hanji answers. “Ymir,” they say simply, and the word appears to mean nothing to anyone but the engrossed brunette. They’re not saying any more, already nose-deep back in their notes, scribbling furiously. I sigh and stand unsteadily. My thigh itches.

Reaching down, I offer Marco my hand, and he takes it to help him stand again. I brush dirt off of his back.

“What are we waiting for, then?”

Levi shrugs and pulls out his cell phone, already calling Erwin. He leaves the room without another glance toward Hanji. I look between them and Moblit, decide that the only person worth noticing is too engrossed in their work, and leave the room as well. I catch Marco giving an awkward half-wave before he skitters out to catch up with me.

Erwin picks us up in the same place he’d left us, armed with coffee, thank god. The rain’s let up some as well, so we can drive without genuine concern that we’ll need to turn the car into a boat at some point.

“What happened?” Erwin asks, always straight to the point. He passes two huge cups of good old Dunkin’ Donuts jet fuel back to us, which Marco and I converge upon like starving hyenas. Levi fills him in in the meantime, pointedly ignoring the stream of muffled curses that I spew when I burn my tongue on my coffee.

By the time Erwin’s been informed and subsequently bored to death by my mildly offensive opinions of Moblit and Pixis, we’re most of the way back to Trost. Luckily, traffic isn’t too bad, and the rain is quite behaving.

“You’re going to have to wait a few days,” Erwin says, looking in the mirror at me. I give him a healthy glare.

“Why?”

“Your stitches.”

I huff and puff. “It’s just going up an elevator and talking to some old baldy. I don’t need my ass muscles for that.”

“You don’t know what he’s gonna ask for it in return, though.”

That’s true. I ignore it. “I’m going tomorrow,” I announce, turning to the window to stare out at the now-dark freeway. 

“I’ll come with you,” Marco says quietly after a while. I look over at him, but he’s staring at his coffee, flipping the little plastic tag on the lid idly. 

Immediately, I’m nervous. “You don’t have to,” I start, already preparing some line about resting or whatever, but Marco sees through me like I’m made of glass.

“I do. I need to know about this stuff,” he says, brow furrowing. “I need to be prepared.”

I don’t need to ask for what. I’m not entirely sure how accompanying me on my journey to finagle an old book off Pixis is going to help, but I know by now that questioning Marco at this point is just going to be hopeless. His mind is set. He’s no less paranoid of macaroni horses than I am, but his determination to prevent his fate overrides his fear. 

I just nod.

Levi and Erwin make no move to protest either, just drinking their coffee quietly up front.

Around midnight, we all roll out of Erwin’s car and into Eren’s house. Erwin drives off to start his shift at Target. I feel a little bad for making him the chauffeur, but it occurs to me that there’s probably a reason Levi had Erwin drive instead of himself or Eren. That’s a whole can of worms I’m not ready to open. 

Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are all tangled up on the couch, talking quietly amongst themselves when we pile into the basement. I stuff my hands in my pockets. Armin turns toward us, Mikasa not moving her chin from the top of his head. “How’d it go?”

“About as well as could be predicted,” I grumble, rubbing the back of my neck. “Not much to relate right now.”

Eren hums and somehow manages to extricate himself from the pile. Not without falling off the couch, but he manages. I stifle a laugh.

He comes over and stands in front of Levi, and they have another stupid eye conversation, so I grouse and move to steal his spot on the couch. I’ve grown rather attached to it, given that it’s holding more of my blood than any other piece of furniture in my life. Armin and Mikasa look me over, Armin leaning back against Mikasa’s chest. Her pointed chin is still resting on top of his head, mussing his hair a bit. 

Looking at them, I realize my chest doesn’t hurt anymore. Weird.

Eren and Levi trot upstairs, and Marco sits awkwardly behind us on the bottom step. I feel a twinge of guilt, but I figure if he wanted to be near us, he’d come over.

Fishing my cigarettes off the floor, where I’d left them before we took our field trip, I light one and sigh grumpily. Stupid apocalypse, stupid Moblit making Marco feel like he’s the bad guy, stupid titans, stupid everything. Armin nudges me with his foot and leans forward, detaching himself from Mikasa a bit. “Didn’t go that well?”

I run a hand through my hair and shake my head. “It’s all theories for now, but they’re all ass.” I exhale and ash my cigarette over the overflowing ashtray. 

Eren calls for Mikasa and Armin from upstairs, so they untangle further and depart. Mikasa charges straight up the stairs, but Armin lingers by me for a moment. He smiles down at me weakly, trying to give me strength, and I pat his elbow in a manner that both thanks him and encourages him to get the fuck out of my face. I’m blaming the itching on him at this point, and that is not a situation he wants to be in.

Marco stands up and moves to the couch, taking the seat they’d vacated. I turn toward him with a slight groan, dumping my legs in his lap whether he likes it or not. He allows it, though, and moves to rest his arms on my ankles.

“How are your stitches?”

“Fucking itchy,” I reply tersely, rubbing my hand irately up and down my thigh. I know better than to scratch, but the itching may just be too powerful. 

Marco hums and leans further into the couch, playing with his fingers idly. 

“Hey, Marco.”

He looks at me, and I take a deep drag off my cigarette, not actually prepared for this conversation. I don’t know why I started it, but it’s open now, so I may as well just barrel through. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Not killing me,” I respond bluntly, and he pales just a little. He glances between me and the floor nervously. 

“Um… yeah.”

“Out of curiosity,” I mumble around a lungful of smoke, “Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs morosely. “Didn’t want to.”

“You just didn’t feel like committing homicide?” I try to joke a little, but it doesn’t seem to help his mood.

Sighing and covering his face with his hands, Marco slouches and leans his head against the back of the couch. He stays like that for a while before lowering his hands and looking at me again. “I took one life already, okay? Kinda swore I’d never do it again.”

Oh. I swallow, trying not to avert my gaze, but that pair of sentences fills my chest until it feels like I’m going to explode. It hurts. It hurts even more knowing that I’d looked him in the face, bloody and delirious, and asked him to give me a botched lobotomy like I’d asked him to get me a glass of water.

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. The ember of my cigarette burns too low and stings my fingers, so I dump it unceremoniously into the ashtray on the floor. Really gotta empty that.

“For what?”

“You know,” I sigh, looking back at him. I carefully cross my legs under me and scoot across the couch until my knees hit his thigh. I don’t know if he wants it, or even if I want it, but the air seems to be screaming for some kind of contact. To let Marco know that he’s not alone. To let me know that I’m not going insane.

He reaches out to me carefully, and I twine my fingers with his again, trying so damn hard not to notice that his fingers seem to have been molded to fit perfectly into the spaces between mine. Even the idea makes my head spin and my heart ache. I can’t do this, though. We can’t do this. And yet, here we are.

I look up at him, and he’s looking at me like that again, with that something pouring from his gaze and into mine. I think about the look on Moblit’s face right before we’d left, and my stomach turns a little. 

So wrapped up in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed just how close he is to me, his eyes gentle, his fingers tight around mine. My heart picks up. I can feel my palm sweating. My breath is short in my smoked-out chest, whistling out through my broken nose, and Marco’s leaning closer to me.

We’re so close, so close that we’re breathing each other’s air again. His breath tastes sweet on my tongue, like cheap coffee with too much sugar in it, and my head spins faster. 

“Hey, are you guys—” I reel back from Marco, falling over against the arm of the couch, and stare frantically up at Armin. He looks between us, confused, but continues. “Are you guys hungry? There’s pizza.”

“Oh, man, yeah,” I pipe up, falling off the couch like I’d mocked Eren for doing earlier. I have to abandon ship, though. This is too much for me. The way Marco’s freckles look on his cheeks from that close… the image is fucking burned into my retinas for the rest of time. 

I scramble up the stairs, Armin behind me and Marco behind him. Attempting to look casual, I give an excessively jovial greeting to the people upstairs I’d seen like five minutes ago.

Levi’s staring at me. I don’t like that stare. He has a lot of stares, but this one is special, and I’ve only seen it a few times before. It’s something like an, ‘Oh, bitch, you better not, because you are the least responsible person in the room and I’m tired of mopping up after you’ kind of stare. I give him a half-assed shrug in response and grab the slice with the most meat on it. 

I move to lean against the kitchen counter, trying really hard not to watch Marco move around the room, making admirably non-awkward conversation with Eren, the only other person besides me and Levi that he knew prior to the whole werewolf thing. Armin and Mikasa stand nearby, Armin contributing brightly when he can, but I’m kind of getting the feeling Marco’s ignoring him. I don’t want to think about why.

After a few tries, Marco responds, and it seems like he’s warming up to Armin against himself. I’m glad. They’re like-minded, the big nerds, and Marco needs friends that don’t frequently drag him into near-death experiences.

Funny that a fucking _werewolf_ is less threat to him than I am. Hi, I’m Jean Kirschtein, and it may actually be my job to get people killed.

As if on cue, Levi sidles up to me, holding a fresh cup of coffee. It’s not for me. He leans against the counter next to me in a manner that suggests to me that I’m about to be the proud recipient of a new asshole.

We’ve known each other that long, I guess, because he’s reading me just as much as I am him. I’m kind of surprised we can’t have gay eye contact conversations too. I guess I’m not a ‘sustained-eye-contact’ kind of guy. 

“You know you can’t,” he murmurs into his coffee, right before he sips it carefully. 

“I know.”

“We don’t know anything about his role in all this.”

I sigh and cram the rest of my pizza into my face. I’m not hungry anymore, but it saves me from having to reply. I know he’ll just criticize me if I say that maybe there is no role, or if I say I’ll keep an eye on him, or if I say that I can manage to keep my distance. Because I know just as well as Levi does that all three options are bold-faced lies.

Trying not to stare from across the room, I turn and lean down on the counter, crossing my arms irritably on the fake marble. I stare moodily at the cactus Eren has resting next to his coffee-maker.

Levi looks at me, something approximating pity crossing his face as he sips his coffee. I can’t help but feel like he’s judging me.

We both know it’s too late. No matter how overworked my denial gland is.

I sigh and lean my head down into my arms, trying really hard not to cry again. Two days in a row is too damn much. 

Levi moves away from me, so all I’m left with is the burn of the empty air against my lips, where my skin is desperate for Marco’s sweet breath.

\--

I sleep fitfully that night, and Marco does too. He’d managed to convince me to take the couch, so he’s left with the pile of sleeping bags, and neither of us can stay asleep for more than an hour at a time.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think at one point, he’d woken up and whispered his dream to me, voice tense and shaking, and it sounded all too familiar.

It’s the same dream I’ve been having every night for months.

That could very well have been a dream too, though, because Marco’s voice had come from the darkness what sounded like a thousand miles away, and I’d struggled to understand, blearily staring up at the twisting ceiling. 

When morning rolls around, I have a splitting headache.

I’m in the bathroom, having taken a bit too much ibuprofen and trying to brush the foul taste out of my mouth. My body is sore from tensing up all damn night. Marco barges in, his hair askew, eyes foggy and puffy, and he nudges me aside a bit. I make room for him, brushing moodily.

He leans down, elbow on the sink, and squirts a blob of minty goop onto his toothbrush. He doesn’t straighten up, hanging his head sleepily as he brushes. I’m almost worried that he’s going to pitch forward into the sink, but he seems to be doing an okay job of keeping himself standing.

I finish up, spitting and swishing, and I collapse onto the closed toilet to wait for him to get the hell out of my way. The bathroom’s too small to smoosh past him, with the way he’s leaning on the counter.

Sighing, I dig the palms of my hands into my eyes. “You still wanna come with, Padre?” He blinks blearily at me, brush stilling. “It’s gonna be boring at best, frustrating at worst.”

He spits and straightens up, rinsing off his brush. I’m wondering if it’s still too early for him to be able to form words. 

“Yeah,” he says after a while, wiping his hands on the towel behind my head. “I don’t understand any of this. I’ve studied the Bible, but there’s not too much on titans, or whatever they’re called. Pretty much all we have are the Nephilim. Our apocalypse is… a little different, I guess.”

I run a hand through my hair and sigh before I look up at him. “Marco, have you ever felt God?”

He stares at me, suddenly very awake, and leans his hip against the counter. I watch him closely, his eyes narrowing slightly as he considers me. He reaches up slowly and pulls a necklace out of his shirt, one I’ve never seen. I guess he wears it under his clothes. It’s a simple wooden cross on a long strand of leather. He holds it in his hands, moving his gaze from my face to the cross, before clasping his fingers over it.

It’s a while before he speaks. His eyes slide shut, his hands tight around the symbol, his breathing steady and even. I wonder briefly if he’s searching or remembering.

“I don’t need to,” he says finally, moving to toy with the wood in his fingers. He fidgets with it and looks back up at me, a half-smile spreading over his face. “Sometimes it’s nice to have something to talk to that you know you won’t bother with your petty worries. As for the church, well… I don’t need to feel His presence to do good as long as they believe that He’s working.”

I nod, looking down at my hands. He lets that sink in for a while before he speaks again. “Why?”

I try to think of a way to solidify my thoughts, to make them cohesive. Standing again, I move around him into the basement, intent on my cigarettes. There’s only a few left in the pack, I note with mild chagrin. I light one and sit back on the couch, tucking one foot under me. Marco comes and sits next to me, and as he leans into the couch, he pulls the cross to his lips and nibbles on the long end idly. I notice a few other bite marks there. It’s hard not to laugh at that.

“I can’t say I’ve ever felt Him,” I start. “But that’s probably because it’s not His cycle.”

Marco tilts his head at me. I blow smoke at the ceiling. Where’s Hanji when you need them? I’m shit at explaining this.

“Every theology is real,” I start, picking at my nails. “Even the obscure, weird ones. They rule the world in cycles, and when it’s not their cycle, they sleep. That’s why you see big surges in some religions, clusters of miracles, long periods where people seem to have lost their faith and idols fall.” I drag off my cigarette again and look back at him. He’s squinting, blinking, chewing on his cross. When he doesn’t speak, I continue. “The last time the Judeo-Christian guys were in charge, they kind of left the world on a sour note. They’ve been sleeping since something like the fall of the Byzantine Empire, by Hanji’s best guess.”

“Wait, that long?” I look up at him. His brow is furrowed, his face confused. 

“Yep. It’s not clean, and sometimes they overlap. Sometimes a while goes by without anyone in charge. No one’s really sure how it works, but it does.”

“So,” he mumbles, twirling the cross between his fingers. “Now, what, the Norse gods are in charge?”

“Not really.” I take the last good drag off my cigarette and reach over to the ashtray to put it out. “We finished up a short cycle with the pagans maybe twenty or thirty years ago, but up until now, it’s been pretty quiet. There have been signs that the Norse were supposed to take over. They haven’t been waking up, though, not until now. Not even Loki, and he’s usually the first one up and around.”

“How do you know all this?”

I lace my fingers on top of my head. “Hanji. How else? Hanji’s seen all of the cycles somehow. It’s like someone let them join a happy little club where the lotto’s big prize is a variety of apocalypses.”

“Them?”

“Oh,” I say, ruffling my hair and leaning forward onto my knees. “There’s a lot of rules that person doesn’t follow, binary gender norms probably the least of which.”

“Mm,” Marco hums, his eyes flicking to the ceiling, pondering this. I lean back and slouch down, getting comfortable again. 

I let all this information sink in, pausing to light another cigarette. Stupid apocalypses. Stupid riddles, stupid puzzles crossing into territories I can’t even begin to understand. It’s all making my head hurt. I wonder how well Marco’s taking it.

Before I can ask, there’s a thunder moving down the stairs, and Eren trips into the room and stands behind the couch. “You guys going back to central today?”

“Yeah,” I reply, blowing smoke up at him. He waves a hand through the smoke and looks down at me.

“I’ll give you a ride to your place.”

“Thanks.”

Eren runs a hand through his hair, looking from me to Marco and back again. Whatever he’s thinking of saying, though, he keeps to himself, settling for patting me roughly on the shoulder and running upstairs. “We’re leavin’ in about twenty minutes,” he yells down, and I groan at that. Moving quickly sounds lame. At least I don’t have to do anything beyond putting on my shoes. Wearing fresh clothes that are actually mine sounds nice, though, and the thought motivates me enough to haul my ass off the couch.

\--

The temperature in Trost shot back up while we were at Eren’s, on the outer south edge of town. Not technically outside of the city, but far enough away that getting to his place is annoying without a car. Anyway, now it’s about seventy degrees and humid as fuck. I can feel my hair curling over my eyebrows. Annoying. Who decided on this weather system, anyway?

It’s about four in the afternoon when Marco and I finally leave my apartment. Clean clothes, refilled on cigarettes and caffeine, the comfortable weight of a hunting knife resting in the back of my pants. About as close to even as I’m gonna get. 

We ditch the hoodies. Too hot for them now. Even the air in the subway is bordering on stifling. 

Sitting on the train toward central Trost, I scratch lightly at the back of my head and turn toward Marco. His cross is tucked back under his shirt now. “How’s it going?”

He looks at me, surprised. The ring of blood in his eye is shrinking, I notice. Good. It’s getting old. 

“What d’you mean?”

I shake my head slightly and look out the window at the stop we whip by. It’s the stop nearest Marco’s church. We still have a ways north to travel. “I mean, with the whole… cycle thing. Everything.” I look up at him. Ever since he met me, his life’s just been one long shitstorm after another, and I’m not sure if he’d be better or much, much worse without me. 

He laces his fingers in his lap and taps his heels for a minute, staring at the floor. We stop again, and the doors open, a pleasant voice shouting a pair of street names into our ears. Hot air rushes through the doors from the platform, smelling a little like garbage. “It’s a lot to think about,” he says finally, looking back up at me. “To say I’m not afraid would be a lie. I guess… I’m just following you and hoping for the best.”

We look at each other for a moment before I give a small, humorless laugh. “That might not be your best idea, man. It hasn’t served you well so far.”

“Hasn’t it?” His reply is quick, and firm. He smiles at me, a genuine, sweet smile, and shrugs. “I’d be a lot worse off on my own.” He’s said this before, I realize, outside the Target the night we ran into the ghouls. I tilt my head at him before returning his smile with a small one of my own.

Again, I don’t respond beyond that. Not really sure how I could.

We pass the time in silence again, watching people board and leave the train, the stops getting progressively nicer and more modern as we approach the business district, where Pixis’s condo lurks high at the top of a huge glass building full of lawyers and therapists and offices. 

I lead the way into the building. Garrison Foundation Tower, I think it’s called. Something dumb like that. I stride over the shiny tan marble of the huge lobby, past businessmen on their phones and guards with watchful eyes, toward the fleet of elevators that makes up the core of the building. Marco walks behind me, looking around, staring up at the suspended abstract statues meant to represent successful business practices or some crap. Projectors spray peaceful videos of waterfalls against whatever flat surfaces they’re aimed at. The whole thing looks sporadic to me, messy, but I guess that’s the business aesthetic they’re going for now. Art in philanthropy. Meaningless metal swans that could crush ten people if the wire holding them were to snap. Walking through this lobby every day is a danger to your life, and no one really seems to notice.

Stalking past the main check-in desk, I try to look like I know where I’m going. Which I do, but that doesn’t mean the stares of the guys in too-crisp suits as I move by don’t make me nervous. I hit the smooth metal ‘up’ button resting stupidly on a podium in between the two walls, a host of titanium doors on either side. A ‘ding’ directs us toward an opening set of doors on the left.

Marco piles into the elevator beside me, and the doors close on us, trapping us in the bright metal box with some crappy muzak dripping out of the speakers.

I tense up, remembering myself. I’ve been here.

I look at Marco, and we exchange a nervous glance. Anxious familiarity spreads over his face. We both look toward the same spot on the immaculate brushed metal of the doors, expecting the smeared black handprint. The door’s clean.

Reaching over, I hit the button for the top floor, the 80th, and the elevator smoothly ascends. The light ring around the button flickers, just for a moment, before returning to its steady lit state. 

Marco shifts his weight next to me, digging the toe of his shoe into the smooth floor. 

The rapid ascent of the elevator makes me a little dizzy. Changing altitude so quickly, I’m wondering how Pixis manages this shit without getting the bends. He must never leave. My ears pop.

The door opens to reveal a long, bright, windowless hallway. I exhale slowly and step out of the elevator, turning to make sure Marco’s with me. His gaze roves over the blank walls before settling on the wide double-doors at the end of the hall. The handles are huge silver roses with curling stems, which makes me snort. Ancient-ass romantic, Pixis is. We walk down the hallway. Our worn soles squeak on the tile.

There’s a little intercom screen next to the door. I walk up to it and hold the button down. “Dot Pixis?”

A moment passes. Just as I’m looking at the doors, wondering how secured they are, a beep announces the collector’s reply. “Yes?”

“Jean Kirschtein. I need a favor.”

Another beep, followed by a delighted chuckle. I grimace at the intercom. The door next to us buzzes, so I yank it open and move into his condo. 

The entryway is surprisingly plain. Undecorated white walls form a long hallway, with only one direction to go. I’m more noticing the immense spray of broken furniture, cracked display cases, and piles of torn papers that seems to have been projectile-vomited from a lone door set into the wall. The mess almost blocks the hallway. A staff or something is jutting out from the opposite wall, having apparently been blown into the wood or plaster or whatever. Some kind of animal foot hangs from a head of sagging, bright orange feathers. 

“Try not to touch that,” I mumble to Marco, who leans closer to hear me. “In fact, try not to touch anything,” I say as I move through the wide hallway toward the conspicuously out-of-place mess. As we approach, Marco leans down to examine something sticking out of a hole in a display case lying haphazardly on its side. It’s a baseball bat that appears to be wrapped in pages from a book, nails sticking out of the shaft at odd, menacing angles. The handle sticks out invitingly, but Marco heeds my warning and leaves it alone.

I step over the splintered remains of a table and move in front of the door from whence all this apparently came. It looks innocuous enough, but well-behaved rooms don’t blow their contents out like a bomb had gone off inside. 

“Is that…” I look back at Marco, who’s squinting more at the bat now. “That’s the Old Testament.”

I snort, and he raises an eyebrow at me. Turning back toward the door, I roll the sleeve of my thin flannel over my hand and turn the handle through the fabric.

It’s a good thing I don’t make a habit of just strolling into unknown rooms before I check them out, because this particular room doesn’t have a floor. Or a ceiling. Or, as far as I can tell, walls. 

This does not stop it from having doors, though.

Doors line the dark space up and down and sideways, some big, some small, all different colors with different knobs. It is some pretty serious Alice in Wonderland shit. I take a step back and delicately close the door.

Right before the door closes, through the crack, I spy a small, pink door with an obnoxiously large handle right in the middle.

I pause. That’s… where have I seen that?

Marco comes again to my side, giving me a questioning look, and I just shake my head. I have no idea what that room’s deal is. Pixis is getting into some dangerously weird shit, though, if I’m reading the vibes right. I roll my sleeve back up and continue down the main hallway, which spits us out onto a huge balcony.

The entirety of the room in front of us, save the structure from which we’d just emerged, is a series of glass windows. The walls, the ceiling, everything. The view from here is insane. I can see Old Trost in the distance, looming walls dwarfed from this height, its bright red roofs flaming in the dying sunlight that peers between the other buildings nearby. The floor under the balcony is a long, winding pool, meant to imitate a pond. Huge trees spring up from the ground, growing out of god knows what, and the whole room looks to be a contained ecosystem. I look around us, then over at Marco, his face dyed bright from sunlight. The sun is setting right in front of us, the light almost excruciatingly bright. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.

“Jean,” comes Pixis’s soothing old-man voice, and I try to put on a grumpy exterior. He comes up the set of stairs leading from the gardens. My eyes narrow. 

He’s wearing one of those surgical masks they give you to wear when the air quality’s shitty, and a huge pair of sunglasses. I wish I could say I’m kidding when I say that he’s also wearing a black suit and top hat, finishing the outfit with black gloves. He’s almost entirely covered, even his bushy, curly moustache. This is unusually posh. It’s not like he’d been expecting us.

I turn toward him and cross my arms. Better to just get to business. Less room for him to make me comfortable. “What’s up with your hall?”

“Oh, that?” He walks toward us, hands behind his back, heels clicking across the bright tile. “Just a little remodeling, don’t worry about that.”

“Right.” I run a hand through my hair. Marco’s still looking around at the trees and plants, starting when a bird cries loudly to its mate. “Listen, you bought a book five or six years ago. A journal.”

“I buy many books,” he says simply, and the smile behind his words is making me a little crazy. He stops about ten feet away from us. I’m nervous again suddenly, moving to scratch my forearm idly. 

“Yeah, this one’s special.”

“You’ll have to specify.”

“I don’t know much about it. Just that you have it. It’s a journal, handwritten, looks really old probably. Something about ‘Ymir.’ Ringing any bells?”

Pixis tilts his head back slightly, giving the appearance of thinking. I’ve got butterflies for some reason. Something about this is very, very wrong, and I think Marco’s starting to feel it too. He’s standing beside me, fingers reaching up to run over his cross through his shirt. As casually as I possibly can, I move my hand behind me, slowly pushing my shirts up over the handle of my knife. Holding it in my hand is comforting, clearing my mind, allowing me to focus again.

“I remember,” he says finally, a little too cheerful. “Yes, I know just the one. I can’t let you have that, though.”

“Why’s that? Too expensive?”

Pixis’s cheeks wrinkle. He must be smiling wider. I can barely see any of his skin, though, due to a combination of the outfit and the distance. I squint at him, trying to read him. 

“It’s got too many clues,” he says simply. Confusion whirls over my mind again. Pixis drops his hands to his sides. I hold my knife tighter, popping the catch on the sheath. My heart rate picks up quickly, nerves on end, and the sense of _wrongwrongwrong_ grows to a thunderous volume in the air between us.

“Don’t fuck with me, old man,” I spit, knees bending slightly into a more prepared stance. My feet spread wider, my free hand coming up between us. Marco takes a step back. “I’m in no mood. Just hand it over.”

Pixis laughs. Rather, he looks like he laughs, but the sound comes from everywhere around us. I look around quickly before flicking my stare back to him. His shoulders shake and the vibrations rumble up from under us.

Fuck.

The collector reaches up and peels away the mask, a huge, cruel grin twisting his normally friendly features. His teeth shine in the dying sunlight. He pulls his gloves off, slowly, tauntingly, and I notice that his right hand is withered and blackened. His left is smooth, like a mannequin, and white as the marble under us. That’s new.

He’s moving. Too quickly. Right at me. I jump to the side, skidding on the marble, and turn toward him again. His hat had fallen off somewhere, and the entire right side of his bald head is a mass of dark bruises. He pulls his sunglasses off and turns toward me again. My heart drops into my stomach when he turns his eyes on me. His right eye, sagging listlessly, is completely black. The other is covered with a thick white cataract. He grins again, mismatched eyes narrowing to slits, and panic rushes over me in a heavy wave. Marco’s gone.

Pixis reaches his blackened hand toward me. Tar drips from his fingertips. He clenches his thin, knotted fingers into a fist, and more of the goop pours out from between his knuckles, like he’s squeezing it right out of the air. I swallow nervously.

Movement from my right catches my attention. I whip my gaze over to it, taking a cautious step back toward the hallway we’d come from. 

It’s a little girl. Her form shudders in and out of perception. I blink, my eyes focusing, moving rapidly between her and Pixis. 

Her matted black hair covers her greying skin. Scratches rake down her cheeks. The expression she gives me is familiar, sad, lonely, and my breath catches.

Basement girl.

But she’d left. I watched her myself. I’d seen her open her door, and I assumed she’d passed through, into her next life. But here she is, staring at me with huge, pale eyes, her hands holding her tiny stomach as if in pain.

Pixis lowers his hand and links them behind his back again, suspiciously casual. 

The girl moves toward me in slow, troubled steps, her fingers scraping at her stomach. Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out, and I obey my first instinct to move toward her.

Bad move.

A grotesque ripping sound fills the air, wet and organic, and the smell of tar crushes itself into me and almost knocks me on my ass. I cough, trying to get the taste out of my mouth, but it’s pervasive. 

A hole opens up in the little girl’s stomach. She curls over it, her knees knocking together, a small whimper echoing from her dimension onto mine. The hole is dark, cracked, and spreading across her abdomen. I can’t help but stare.

An arm reaches out first, the fingers hot and flaking cracked black chunks away from the flexing joints. It flails around wildly, unnaturally, until it grabs her scrawny little knee for leverage. My eyes widen. 

The head comes out next, dripping black ooze, a high-pitched, nasally whistling emitting from it. It forces its shoulders out of her next, its broad chest catching on her wispy rib bones and bending them outwards with a sickening _crunch_. She gasps, mire running from her tiny mouth, and I back away from her again. I feel sick. She reaches for me, this creature crushing itself out of her being, and all I can do is stare at her.

The image of her sweet face as she’d left me the first time fills my mind. Tears fill my eyes. I shake my head. 

The titan crashes onto the ground from inside of her, its wide, thorny feet kicking her little body away from itself. She collapses onto the floor with a whimper and shudders completely out of my vision then. 

I look back at Pixis, who looks disgustingly satisfied. He tilts his head forward and spreads his arms wide. With what appears to be a monstrous effort, he raises his arms, and the balcony under us shakes violently.

Gotta get out of here.

Spirits phase into my vision all around me, another ten of them, their faces scared and distant. Titans erupt out of them with the same stomach-turning, skin-crawling series of cracks and crunches, dripping tar across the floor, kicking aside their vessels carelessly and moving to surround me. They’re seven or eight feet tall, broad, hardening and cracking and spontaneously emitting volcanic bursts of fire that arc around their bodies. The heat is oppressive. Waves filter through the air, distorting my vision. Sweat’s already pouring down my face.

It occurs to me that I have no idea how to kill these things. It’s twelve on one, including Pixis, and all I have to my name is my hunting knife. I swallow, looking around, evaluating, waiting for one of them to make a move.

It doesn’t take long.

The one that erupted first runs at me, its steps lumbering and loud, and I turn toward it, crouching further down.

It comes up on me, unbearably hot, and I bend back to dodge its molten fist. I pull my knife all the way out and slash upwards, across its wrist at the joint, and its hand crumples off into ash with surprising ease. I jump back a few steps, coughing, trying not to breathe the air. It’s a start.

Keeping low to the ground, I sprint toward it, sliding around its knees to a stop behind it. I whip out with the blade and cut off its leg at the knee, and it crashes down next to me, all sticky tar and hot embers. I lash out quickly and sink my knife right between its eyes, hoping against hope that these things have brains, before dragging the edge down through its flat face and out of its chin. 

The squeal it emits is deafening, like Styrofoam melting in a microwave, and it thrashes wildly before sinking into dust and stilling.

One down. Ten more coming at me. Pixis in the background, smoke curling around his blackened fingertips, huge eyes mocking me.

The titan running at me next is stopped in its tracks by a bat colliding with its face, blowing a load of sparks out the back of its skull like brains, exploding from the pressure. I jump back a few times, crouched like an animal on the tile, stained blade held in front of me.

Marco kicks the titan he’d just decimated in the knee, knocking it down to the floor with a loud ‘thud.’ Ashes kick up in a cloud from its crumpling body. 

This evens the odds a little.

I pick myself up and sprint toward Pixis, dodging around slow, clumsy titans. He laughs loudly, monstrously, the sound rattling the huge windows, and as I jump toward him, knife-first, his fingers extend into sharp, shadowy claws and clamp around my blade.

He laughs in my face. My feet follow my momentum and I swing them up, using his support to drop-kick him in the gut with all the strength I can muster. The breath shoots from his lungs in my face, coming out as black smoke that obscures my vision. I yank myself away from him, dropping gracelessly, feeling no pain from the fall. He stumbles, I roll over my shoulder into a crouch, jumping a few feet away to give myself time to read his next move.

Pixis straightens, the too-wide smirk creeping back over his features. I lick my lips, trying to listen to my surroundings, but adrenaline blocks out all sound but static and my own heartbeat. 

He’s moving again, phasing in and out, aiming his dark claws at me. I swipe up, blocking his strike, and follow the momentum with another kick to the gut. He jolts, stunned, and I whirl behind him. His pale, smooth hand is clutching the back of his suit jacket, awkward and cramped, fingers slipping in the material. I lash out across his back, cutting him open across the spine, but the move is ineffective. Black ooze seeps out in place of blood, filling the wound, snaking out in spidery, veiny stripes across his skin. 

Pixis hauls his elbow behind him, catching me right in the nose. _Fuck._ I stumble backward, crashing against the smooth plate glass that makes up the railing of the balcony. Stars obscure my vision. I think I felt it break again, but my thoughts won’t solidify long enough to be sure.

A frozen, wriggling hand wraps around my throat, Pixis’s thin body pressing me against the glass. I cough and struggle to breathe, trying to clear my vision, reaching up lamely to sink my knife into his shoulder. He hisses, but is otherwise unfazed. 

“Jean,” he hisses in my ear. I feel wet flecks of blood or spit or tar against my cheek. The best I can manage is a gurgle. Pixis laughs.

The dark stars clear out of my vision a little. He’s too close to my face, breathing heavy smoke into my eyes, teeth sharp and stained black. 

I wiggle, reaching up to box him around the ears. He grunts, then turns to throw me onto the marble. I bounce off the floor, sliding a little in the ashes now coating the floor. Before I can move, he’s on me again, crouched on my back and crushing my ribs. A shivering sigh escapes him, along with the telltale sound of ripping flesh, before the sound of my knife hitting the floor echoes through my ears. I fight against his weight, fingers scrabbling at the ground, searching for my knife. 

Pixis fists his hand in my hair and yanks my head up. My mouth falls open on a pained grunt, jaw tightening, eyes squeezed shut. 

“You did so well this week,” he rasps in my ear, his words like poison wriggling into my mind. Under his normal, gentle voice, there’s an ancient malice echoing up from another time, distorting his words. I open one eye and try to look around at him, my throat raw from my panting breaths. “I thought you’d be good, but you’re so good at fucking things up, aren’t you?” A humming starts up from somewhere, rising over the static. I think it’s the roar of my weak blood supply from my strained neck, bent at an awkward angle.

I buck and wriggle under him, panic giving me strength. He wobbles, sharp heels digging into my kidneys, laughing harshly at my efforts. He pulls on my hair again and hisses, “We’ve been fucking with him for _years_. But you? You outdid us, Kirschtein. Should offer you a job.” He’s laughing again, the sound dry and scratchy. I’m growing more confused, angrier, struggling against his grasp. My searching fingers brush something metal, something sharp, and I give a choking sound through my dry, aching throat.

Pixis continues, talking at me, whispering in my ear. I’m not listening. I’m trying to edge closer to my knife, fingers straining, searching. The collector seems unconcerned. He’s more aware of the fact that I’ve stopped listening to his bullshit.

“ _Look at him!_ ” The sound fills my ears, my head, my whole body, and I wince at the stabbing pain in my skull. I open my eyes, though, looking in front of me at what Pixis wants me to see.

Marco’s frantic, moving fast, swinging the Old Testament bat with more strength than any one human has any business wielding. He’s cracking the singed, smoking bat against a titan’s chest again and again and again, teeth gritted, eyes on fire with rage. The nails in the bat are white-hot, tearing at the thing’s ribs and ripping gashes in the hard black coating. Another titan lumbers up behind him, but he turns, bat ready, and crushes its skull out of existence. The thing falls, crumbling, and Marco’s already sprinting across the balcony toward another one, fresh out of its spirit conduit and not quite adjusted to the cool air.

I shudder, watching him, the pain of Pixis ripping at my hair almost fading in the horror that spreads over me watching him rip through monsters so much larger than him.

The collector leans down to me again and laughs darkly. “Look how angry he gets. Look at him, all scared and alone. Do you think it’s dark where he goes?” I choke out a sob. Pixis laughs harder, using his grip to smash my face against the ground. I groan, eyes squeezing shut, pain flooding my brain and momentarily wiping it. Pixis slaps me across the back of the head again. “Let’s find out. Together.”

And then he’s gone, blinking across the balcony. Marco turns away from the pile of ash he’d just sprayed across the glass railing and comes face to face with Pixis. I watch his eyes widen, his humanity seeping back into them.

I’m already scrabbling to my hands and knees, grabbing at my knife, trying as hard as I can to get to my feet but I just can’t manage it. My breath wheezes out of me, shaky, my hands covered in ash and clotted with drops of tar.

Pixis reels back with his claws, his laughter already echoing shrilly around me. Marco stumbles backward, dropping the bat, trying to get away from the thing breathing hot into his face. 

I’m panting, tripping to my feet, dragging my filthy knife across my forearm. Dead man’s blood. Let’s hope to god whatever’s riding Pixis is a spirit, or this won’t do anything.

My blood spurts across the metal. It clots with the ashes, making a paste out of the fine dust. I’m moving toward them. Not fast enough.

Marco stares. Pixis exhales. His claws, pulsing with some insane pressure, spread, then narrow into a single point. 

Not fast enough. Blood runs down my arm. My feet slam against the tile.

The collector hauls forward. His hand sinks deep into Marco’s gut. The priest’s eyes widen further, shock and pain spreading across his face.

The pressure thickening the air around us bolts through Pixis’s arm. The shock explodes out of Marco’s back in a huge spray of blood. The force blows out the glass railing behind him and spreads a huge, spidery crack through the building’s windows. The sound is deafening.

Marco lets out a shaky breath. Blood trickles out of the corner of his mouth. His hands come to grasp at Pixis’s arm, buried deep in his guts, nails digging into dry, wrinkled flesh.

I’m on Pixis then. He pulls out of Marco’s stomach, huge black lines spidering out across his abdomen from the hole. There’s a hole. Marco stumbles backwards, eyes glazing over, off the balcony. He falls into the pool below us.

Blind with rage, I ram the blood-covered knife into Pixis’s face and head, over and over and over until his ooze is coating us both. I let him go, and he flops off the balcony, crashing down into the pool next to Marco’s lifeless body.

The room is quiet then. My feet crunch on the broken glass under my shoes. The very last of the sun’s light twinkles through the buildings, still struggling to make itself known.

My knife falls to the ground. I look over the edge of the balcony at the pool below me. Marco’s floating down there, next to Pixis’s disfigured corpse. Blackness spreads from the collector, seeping through the water like ink.

Emptiness climbs over me. My mind is nothing but white noise. I watch the ink spread over Marco’s corpse. I’ve never felt so helpless, so alone.

_Is it dark where he goes?_

I reach up and clutch at the sides of my aching head. My finger skids in the blood from the torn-open wound on my brow. I clutch at my hair, staring up at the ceiling, watching clouds move back over the sky at what seems to be an alarming rate.

Marco’s dead.

Pixis, or whatever was riding him, killed him.

Gutted him like nothing at all.

I’m screaming, I think, but I don’t have the presence of mind to attend to it. I just stand there, mind whirling, world crashing down around me, and curse whatever set of gods allowed this to happen. All of them. Fuck it, why not. None of them have ever done me any good, and now they’ve let Marco die.

Unless that was me.

It probably was.

I wish I could pay someone to give me a lobotomy. 

I take deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. It works out more like hyperventilating.

Gotta get his body. Can’t just leave him here.

I turn toward the stairs, sore and exhausted, depression sinking deep into every corner of my system. The stairs are shallow, easy to get down, and they curve around to meet the rounded edge of the pool. 

From this angle, the water looks clear. Pixis has floated off to one side.

As for Marco, he’s kicking, spluttering, coughing up water. He manages to get his feet under him and stands, coughing hard, struggling to breathe. I stand at the edge of the water, staring, wondering if I’ve just completely lost my mind.

He takes in a few gasping breaths and claws at his torn shirt, at the deep black bruising on his stomach.

The hole is gone.

My breath is weak, shaky, but I’m already wading into the pool, struggling against the waist high water. I shout his name, my voice cracking. 

It’s impossible.

He turns toward me, his eyes wide, scared, jaw slack. He reaches toward me then, whimpering my name, struggling to make some sort of sound. I throw all my precaution to the wind. All the shouldn’t-bes and can’t-haves and gore-soaked hypotheticals go straight out the window.

I drown all that shit as I grab his face and pull him to me, crushing our lips together.


	8. Misattribution of Arousal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _[There are storms_  
>  I must brave  
> There are things I must do  
> Things I must not do  
> ...  
> And I'll see you when you're older  
> When we're older.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

I fucked this up. I know I did. I always do.

But you have to believe me, I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.

I didn’t mean it. I just… I wasn’t thinking. From the moment our lips pressed together, held tight against each other as if the world would end if we parted, I wasn’t thinking straight.

And that’s how we ended up here, on this subway platform.

Let me backtrack. Let me try to explain myself. 

_Please._

\--

My hands are shaking, my eyes squeezed shut, pressed closer to Marco than I’ve ever dared. He’s cool against me. I can feel his weak, fluttering heartbeat through his ribs. He hesitates for a second before his arms are wrapped around my waist crushingly tight. 

He kisses me back, hard and desperate. I push my tongue between his lips. He gratefully deepens the kiss, tilting his head slightly, moving closer, closer, closer. He doesn’t taste sweet anymore. He tastes like blood and ash and smoke and I fucking choke myself on it, trying desperately to get closer. One of his hands drags up my back, his fingers fisting tight in the fabric between my shoulders, his other hand digging his nails into the small of my back.

It’s impossible.

I saw Marco die. I saw all of the contents of his abdominal cavity blow out of his back. I looked through his torso and saw the hole where his spine should have been, strong vertebrae shaping the curve of his back, just… gone. 

You know what you can do without a good chunk of your spinal column?

Not a whole hell of a lot.

But here’s Marco, pushing against me, holding onto me like I’m the only thing keeping the world steady, and all I can do is cling to him with equal force. I knot my fingers in his short black hair, using my grip to pull our mouths together in a manner that must be uncomfortable. He obliges and kisses me harder.

Gasping breaths escape between our lips. Mine. I can’t breathe through my nose much. It must be fucked beyond repair at this point. It hurts badly, crushed against Marco’s cheek, but I can’t bring myself to care when his nails are raking down my back and he’s kissing me and he’s _alive_.

I don’t know how long this goes on. I just cling on, wrapped around him, probably crying against his lips, and he just holds me tighter and tighter, his insanely strong arms wrapped all around me.

He pulls away after a while, gasping, and he nuzzles his face into mine with a shaky sigh. “Jean,” he murmurs, fingers gripping me tight again. “Jean, Jean…”

“Need to get out of here,” I manage, kissing whatever parts of his face he presses against my dry lips. My fingers move to the base of his skull, running my thumbs over congealed blobs of watery ash on his face, kissing away dirt and blood. “Gotta go.”

He buries his face in my neck, shaking hands grabbing at me, and he might be sobbing, but that could also be me. I turn and bury my face in his wet hair. The smell of whatever Pixis bled into the water sits deep over him, burning and oppressive, but I press myself deeper in my search for Marco’s smell. It has to be here.

I start moving to slide away from him, but I’m not trying that hard, and he’s holding me so tight that I’m starting to question how badly I want to leave. I prod him again, though, trying to get him to move.

“Jean,” he says, his voice breaking. “Jean, please, just…”

He sounds so scared. My chest hurts. I feel like I’m being crushed under the weight of his terror. Not like I can blame him; I’m just as scared. My mind is whirling, a mess, eyes searching restlessly for anything to realign myself to reality. I’m acutely aware of the corpse floating at the edge of the pond, lifeless and bruised and mutilated.

“Marco, come on, we gotta leave,” I say, trying to turn us so I can push him back toward the stairs. He shakes his head, but stumbles backward through the water, nudging his face more firmly against my neck. I run my hands over his shoulders in what I hope is a soothing manner, if it’s not betrayed by the quaking, lingering touches over the middle of his back.

When we hit the edge of the pool, the daylight is fading fast from the room, and a thousand tiny lights winding through the trees come on like stars. I nudge at Marco’s head until he’s in a position where I can kiss him again, and again and again and again, desperately making sure that he’s actually here, that he’s not just going to fade out of existence the second I turn around. He reaches up and runs his fingers through my hair with a soft whimper.

“Jean, what…”

I don’t let him finish. It’s not the time now. “Don’t know. Come on. Need to find the journal.”

How I’m still thinking about the job, I have no idea. I grabbed onto that purpose in my desperate search for reasoning. He latches onto it too, pulling an inch away from me that feels like a mile, his hands coming to grasp at my sides. “Where is it?”

I turn and pull myself up out of the pool, reaching my hands down to him as he follows suit. I feel no shame in pulling him against me again, just for a moment. “Probably the library,” I murmur against his jaw, and he shakily nods. I grab his hand and drag him along the path, past the stairs, toward a door set into the lower level of the white cube we’d come out of. 

When I try the door, it’s locked, and given that I’m already pretty testy that’s enough to piss me off. I kick the weak door in with a grunt. My knee gives a pained jolt from the impact. It swings on its hinges, splinters flitting to the ground, and the motion-sensing light in the library bathes the room in a comfortable glow. 

Every book in the room is wrapped in plastic on the shelves. Some of them have metal casing. One gets a shelf completely to itself, barricaded in with what looks like bulletproof glass, and for good reason. It’s ramming itself against the glass with loud, repetitive thuds, and occasionally its covers flap open like a shrieking mouth. I shiver and look away from it.

Looking around, at the shelves that reach up to the ceiling and all the way back along the walls of this insanely large room, I’m starting to feel a little despair. This could take _hours_ , and I just wanna get the fuck out of this shithole. 

Luckily, Marco seems to have some kind of brain in his skull and looks at the books lying open and arranged haphazardly on a table in the center of the room. “Jean, isn’t that her handwriting?”

I lean down and squint at one of the books, old and clothbound and significantly less smelly. “Think so. Why’s it over here?”

Marco looks around for some kind of hint, moving closer against my side. I look at the other books, some of which are written in pictographic languages long out of use. They’re spread open across the table as if being studied, pages sticking up slightly. Pixis’s cell phone is lying on one of the tomes. I grab it and shove it in my wet pocket.

No time for this. Figure it out later. After glancing around for bags or something to carry the book in so I don’t have to touch it, I look back at Marco. Specifically, his destroyed black t-shirt.

“Gimme that.”

He raises his eyebrows but pulls it off anyway, handing the bloody, dirty fabric to me. It’s scant, but better than nothing. I turn to him again and watch him press his hand to his gut. The skin is bruising deep purple already. The thick black lines I’d noticed before he fell have swollen up as well, eight of them, jaggedly tearing through his skin from the edges of where the hole had been.

Marco presses his fingers into the empty center of the injury, where the bruise is tinted bright red with spots of blood that leak to the surface. His fingers slip in the liquid slightly. He wipes them off on his soaked jeans.

His gaze moves to mine, his eyes wide and frightened. “Jean,” he murmurs, the unspoken question thick in the air between us. I only shake my head, not looking away from him. For once. 

“I don’t know, Marco,” I say, dropping his shirt over the journal we’re looking for. I move to pull my flannel off, but not before pulling my fairly-squished cigarettes out of the chest pocket. As he pulls the shirt on (which just barely fits him) I find an intact cigarette and light it with shaking fingers.

I really hope the smoke alarms are duds.

His cross hangs loose under his heart. There’s a long crack up the middle of the wood now. He runs his fingers slowly over it. As he bites his lip, I watch tears pool in his narrowed eyes, but he just wipes them away roughly with the heels of his hands.

He buttons the shirt over his dark, freckled chest, stopping to wipe the blood off a little so that it doesn’t soak through the thin material. 

Turning away, I stuff my cigarette between my lips and set to wrapping the book in the torn fabric. When I lift it away from the table, my breath catches.

Under it, smeared across the table, is a sticky black handprint.

My heart skips a beat. I look over at Marco, who stares at it with equal nervousness, fingers coming up to press at his cracked cross through my somewhat singed shirt. He flicks his eyes back to me. 

“Let’s go,” I mutter, reaching out to slide my fingers between his. He squeezes my hand and nods.

As we leave, I’m half expecting a nightmare-fuel Pixis with an army of titans waiting for us, but it’s surprisingly quiet. I drag Marco up the stairs quickly, stopping to grab my dirty knife from the edge of the balcony and toss my cigarette into the pool before we run back toward the elevator.

Neither of us dare to look back.

The elevator ride seems immeasurably slow. We don’t look at each other as we descend. My eyes are glued to the floor. I don’t know about Marco.

It’s raining when we emerge. Remaining calm enough not to fucking bolt through the lobby is trying, but I manage it, trembling with energy. I make up for it by sprinting into the subway, Marco not half a pace behind me. I’m acutely aware of the dirt and blood and grime coating both of us. We get strange looks as we shove through the turnstiles and onto the arriving train, but I just don’t give a shit anymore. Marco and I sit next to each other in the back corner, thighs pressed together, still holding hands. I’m not entirely sure I’m okay with the idea of ever letting go.

“We have to go to Target,” I mumble, staring at our soggy shoes pressed against each other on the dirty subway floor. My grip is tight around the shirt-covered book.

“Okay,” Marco replies, equally as quiet, biting his lip. I want to kiss him again.

\--

When I finish the story, Erwin turns his intense gaze to Marco, who freezes up.

“Let me see.”

I shakily lower myself into a computer chair while Marco struggles with the buttons on his shirt. 

Erwin silently takes pictures of Marco’s torso with his phone, snapping a few of his chest and one of his back, before he leaves the room for a minute. Marco looks at me, and I shrug slightly, hands gripping my knees. I haven’t stopped shaking yet. It’s getting annoying.

When Erwin comes back, he hands Marco a wet paper towel. “Wipe the blood off. See if the lines come off.”

They don’t. Marco scrubs at them a little, brow furrowing, breath loud and shaky, and Erwin stops him with a hand on his shoulder before he does himself any damage.

Erwin takes pictures of Marco again, now that the circle of dried blood has been wiped away, and I notice that all around the ragged edges of where the hole had been, another line is swelling up. The faintly reddish grey line passes through the middle of all the other lines, forming a circle on his abdomen. I swallow with some difficulty, given how dry my throat is, and start chewing my nails again.

The nail on my index finger breaks between my teeth with a loud _snap_ , prompting both Marco and Erwin to stare at me. I mutter an apology, but don’t stop chewing.

Erwin straightens up and immediately starts tapping rapidly on his phone. Marco looks at me, then nervously shrugs back into my shirt. I chew through the nail on my middle finger. It starts to bleed a little, but I’m not that concerned. I just want to go home.

Marco comes over and kneels in front of me, sitting on his heels. I scoot the chair forward so that he’s between my legs and reach out to cup his face. He closes his eyes, leaning into my hands. 

I open my mouth to say something, but no words come out. I have no idea what to say. My chest hurts. What do you say to a guy who just died and then didn’t? He’s gotta be scared out of his mind, but he’s putting on this stupid brave face, and I have no idea what to say to him.

“Don’t,” he mumbles, hands coming up to rest over mine. “Don’t think like that.”

“How do you know what I was thinking?” I lean my forehead down against his, my thumbs rubbing some dirt off of his freckles. It barely makes a dent, but it’s a start.

“It’s all over your face.” He twists his fingers between mine. “You have so much guilt, Jean. I don’t understand.”

I shift and rest my cheek against the top of Marco’s head. He moves one hand to my waist, his thumb sliding up my shirt to rub soothingly over my hip bone. It’s not unwelcome. I reach up and run my fingers through his hair, catching on a million little tangles. Our twined fingers rest warm in my lap.

“Go home,” Erwin says from behind me, sliding his phone back into his pocket. I groan and nod. Those words have never sounded so fucking sweet. 

I stand heavily, my joints creaking and sore. God, am I getting old? I reach down and brush my hand against my pocket, checking for my phone out of habit, and I’m kinda surprised when I find one in my pocket. It’s been days since I’ve seen mine.

Oh. Pixis’s. I turn to Erwin, pulling out the phone and holding it out. “This is his,” I say, with an undertone of ‘kindly get it away from me before it hatches.’

Erwin looks down at it, then shakes his head. “Keep it in case we need to get a hold of you.”

I groan, but shove it back in my pocket. Just what I need, some hundred-year-old looney toon’s weirdly well-kept iPhone. God only knows what kind of horrifying shit is in it.

Marco leaves the office in front of me, and Eren bounds up to him, jaw slack. “Jesus, Marco, you look like shit. What happened? Is that Jean’s ugly-ass shirt?”

As he turns to talk to Eren, Erwin grabs my elbow and leans down to me.

“I’m letting you go because you’re competent. You know if something happens, you have to kill him.”

I stiffen, then turn to him with a glare, fists clenched. He doesn’t back off. I cross my arms and face him fully. “Have you considered that maybe he’s just unkillable? Maybe he’s a zombie. I heard a few reports out of the Congo a few years ago, stuff like that.”

Erwin stares at me. “Wishful thinking is unbecoming of you, Jean.”

Not gonna dignify that with a response. I turn on my heel, grabbing Marco by the sleeve and storming out. I hear him yelling a goodbye over his shoulder as I haul him away. 

I’m barely outside before I’m lighting another cigarette, this one slightly bent in the middle. Marco stands next to me, arms crossed, watching me with tired eyes. I still can’t think of anything to say. Especially not with Erwin’s words bouncing around my skull. I try not to think about how right he is as I suck in a huge lungful of smoke. It makes me just a little dizzy.

“Marco, let’s get trashed,” I say eventually as we walk toward the bus stop. “I’m still on vacation I think, and this was easily the shittiest day either of us have ever had.”

He chuckles softly, scratching the back of his head. “You think that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t care if it is or not,” I grumble, flicking my cigarette into a puddle. “I think I have a bottle of whiskey under the sink.”

He shifts closer to me and our hands move together again, like magnets at this point. We wait for the bus, sides pressed together from shoulder to knee. He doesn’t seem to mind the contact. 

“Marco,” I murmur after a while, leaning forward to check down the street for any approaching buses. “If you wanna talk about it…”

Marco sighs and runs his free hand through his hair before reaching out and pulling me to him again. I wrap my arms around his waist and rest my chin on his shoulder. We wait in silence, ride the bus in silence, and walk up to my apartment in silence. My stitches are screaming by the time we hit the top, and I’m about ready to pass out.

Someone had washed my ward off the door sometime today, I notice. Figures. I unlock the door and stumble into my warm kitchen. As I move, I pull out Pixis’s phone and chuck it onto the counter, immediately forgetting about it.

Marco closes the door behind us. I take another few steps, then stare at the ground. 

“Jean…” His voice comes softly from behind me, his steps quiet.

I turn to him and bring him close in a gruff, one-armed hug, burying my face in his shoulder. He just lets me. “I thought you were dead,” I rasp after a few minutes of this, of breathing in his dirt and grime.

His hands come up to rest on my waist. My heart pounds in my chest. “I did too,” he mumbles.

I take a step back, separating us again, before I reach out and grab his wrist. He lets me drag him over to the bed and push him so he’s sitting on the edge. Slowly, shakily, I unbutton the shirt and tug it off his shoulders. His bruise is darker now, spreading farther, some parts going a little greenish. At least it hadn’t bled any more.

Marco slides his palm over the thick, raised black marks on his abdomen. The circle is darker now. I stare at it, at the place where Pixis had sunk his hand into Marco like it was nothing. There’s not even a pinprick from where he’d drilled hellish claws into him. Just empty, somewhat mottled skin. It’s too dark to even see his freckles.

This is impossible. 

Marco’s fingers linger on the center of the circle, where I’d been staring, pressing into the skin there as if making sure it’s real.

I bite my lip, knees shaking, and he looks up at me. His eyes are so cold, so lost, so exhausted from his fear that I can’t help the tears that roll down my face. I clench my fists tight. Squeezing my eyes shut forces more tears down my face.

“Jean…”

I feel his hands wrap softly, gently around my fists, fingers moving easily between mine again like I’m not tensed at all. I move closer to him, standing between his legs. 

“Jean,” he says again, so I open my eyes and look at him again. He’s looking at me like he had in Eren’s basement, both times, but the thing behind his eyes is no longer gentle and patient. It’s scared, unsure, anxious, and I want to rub at his mismatched eyes until he’s tender again. I want to erase this whole goddamn day, this whole unholy miracle. He moves to wrap his arms around my waist again, burying his face in my shirt. I let him.

My hands come up to play with his hair a little. My fingers catch on tangles again, trying to sort through them, and Marco shudders against me. 

I can’t take this.

I reach down and tilt his chin up to me again. He looks at me with watery, bloodshot eyes. 

When I kiss him this time, it’s not the violent, crushing desperation from the pool. It’s soft and tender, but needy, both of us shaking to get closer. His hands come up to my wrists, grabbing them, and he tilts his head toward me. 

I can’t take it.

Climbing into his lap, I push Marco down against the bed, my hands running down his sides to his hips. He wriggles and adjusts us so I’m not falling off the bed.

Marco breaks away from our kiss with a sigh. He holds my face and presses our foreheads together. I feel him moving under me, the thud of his shoes hitting the floor loud in the silence, almost as loud as our shaking breaths. I lean into him, dropping soft kisses against his lips, and he wriggles further up onto the bed once he’s done fighting his shoes. I follow after I’ve worked my own shoes off, crawling over to where he’s made himself comfortable on the pillows.

We kiss again, tongues sliding together amidst our panting breaths, my elbows supporting my weight above him. Marco’s running his hands all over me, fisting in my shirt, pushing under it to trace over my bony spine, and I shiver at the feeling.

“Jean,” he murmurs against my lips, pulling away to nibble at my lower lip. “You never let me kiss you before…”

I would play dumb, but I know exactly what he’s talking about. Those times when his expression practically _screamed_ ‘I want to hold you,’ those times when I ran away like the scared ass that I am.

I guess I should admit to it. Marco would know if I lied, anyway. Somehow he always knows. “’M scared,” I mumble against his lips, flattening myself against him. He presses a few more light kisses against my lips, and I catch one and deepen it, unable to get enough of the taste of him, even if it is tainted by darkness. I know Marco’s under there somewhere, and if I kiss him enough, I might find it.

“Of what?” he manages finally, running his hands through my hair. He finds a little shard of plate glass with a grimace, reaching over to put it on the nightstand. 

“Everything. Fucking things up.”

“What changed?”

I sigh. “You died anyway.” He blinks up at me, his hands resting on my waist. I bite my lip, fighting against the tears that burn my tired eyes. “You died whether I let you in or not.”

It doesn’t work. My fighting, I mean. Tears fall onto his cheeks, cutting paths in the ashes there, and he looks at me with this unbearable empathy. I bury my face in his neck so neither of us have to look at each other. He just wraps me tighter in his arms, kissing my ear, smoothing his hands over my shaking shoulders.

After a while, Marco rolls us so that he’s balanced over me. He looks down at me, wiping tears off my face, and kisses me again.

I pull him down against me and wrap myself around him. He leans over me on one elbow, but frees his other hand to hold mine again. His lips are soft against mine, his breath warm and tasteless now, and that’s a definite improvement over the taste of tar. I lean closer to him, kissing him harder, deeper, and he lets out the tiniest noise as he lets me have my way.

That sound might be the death of me.

Despite the fact that I might be kissing a dead man, despite all the shit I did and saw today, despite the pain of losing Marco still resting heavy over me, that little moan goes straight to my dick.

I pull away from Marco, breathing a little harder, and look up at him. He rests our foreheads together, biting his lip. I’m intent on asking him if this is really okay, or trying to change the subject back to getting wasted, or doing _something_ , but Marco leans down and kisses me again. He kisses me breathless, his body pressing against mine, squeezing my fingers tight. When he pulls away again, I’m about out of my mind, and if we’re gonna back off now’s the time.

He speaks first, a soft whisper. “Jean,” he murmurs again, and the way he says my name gives me fucking chills. I bite my lips and try not to wriggle under him. He repeats my name, nuzzling against my jaw until he’s kissing along my neck, and I tilt my jaw back for him readily. “I want you,” he says low against my throat, and that also goes straight to my dick. Arousal’s already curling warm in my gut.

Fuck. 

I nod quickly, and as he leans up to kiss me again, he shifts further between my legs in a way that makes rational thought kind of grind to a halt for a minute. My lips part on a soft gasp, stealing the air from Marco’s sigh, before I’m kissing him again, reaching up to scratch my nails through the short hair on the back of his head. He gives another small sound at the neediness in our kiss, and I swear to god, this man is actually going to kill me with this. 

No priest should be allowed to be this sexy. It has to be against some rule somewhere.

Regardless, I’m already half-hard under him, and I have no intent of denying him whatever he wants. Anything. 

He pulls away, bringing both of his hands to my face again, and looks me straight in the eye. His expression gives away his hesitance, his concern. Before he can speak, I roll my eyes and flip us back over with a twist of my hips, straddling him easily. “You don’t gotta ask, nerd.” I kiss him again, quick and dirty, before sitting up. I pull my shirt off and toss it on the floor somewhere, and I swear, I can see the breath leave his body in a ragged sigh. “I’m yours already.”

He saves me from the blush that spreads over my face by sitting up and wrapping his arms around me, kissing me intensely, all the heat from his gaze spreading between our lips. I can feel him against me, half-hard as well, and I roll my hips against him. He gasps against my lips, eyes shuddering closed, before he remembers himself. His long fingers curl around my bony hips easily, taking care for the stitches on my right side, before sliding warmly up my ribs. Pulling away from my lips again, his dark eyes open, watching with bated breath as his thumbs rub softly over my nipples.

I shiver in his lap, hands moving to his wrists, and he flicks his eyes up to mine. “Is that okay?” The breathless sound to his voice drives me _crazy_. I nod quickly, and he spreads his hands over my chest, watching my skin perk up around the barbells.

His eyebrow twitches, and he bites his lip against a soft groan, but I hear it. I’m rock solid at this point, so I reach down between us to pop the button on my jeans to give myself some relief. He sighs, then leans forward and kisses the center of the sunflower over my heart. His lips drag across my skin then, dropping little kisses over bruises and little burns I hadn’t noticed, until his lips rest against one of my nipples. I try really hard not to gasp at that, but my breath hitches in my chest, and he looks up at me with his lust-dark eyes, practically radiating his need for me. 

Jesus Christ.

His tongue pokes out and laves slowly over sensitive flesh, watching me to make sure it’s alright. I bite my lip harder, a flush spreading over my face, and I grind down against him again in retaliation. His eyelids flutter, his mouth dropping open against my skin, and his hands immediately move to grab at my ass. I reach down between us and unbutton his pants as well, sliding my hand behind the zipper to grope him through his boxers. He moans softly, resting his lips against my chest, eyes still closed, and I’m pretty sure if he’s going to insist on being this fucking hot there’s no way I’m gonna last long enough to fuck him. 

My fingers smooth down his cock, already amazingly hard. “Damn, Marco,” I mumble, and he peers up at me blearily. “This what you’ve been hiding under those robes?” I grin lecherously at him, and he just groans in response, straightening up so he can kiss me again. I let him, just for a moment, just long enough for him to show me just how eager for me he is, before I push him back against the bed with a firm hand. He blinks up at me.

Wordlessly, I scoot back and pull his jeans down over his thighs, and his eyebrows shoot up into his hair. He seems unsure of what to do with his hands, so he just fists them in the sheets. I lick my lips and pull his boxers down too, eyeing him up as his cock bounces out and back against his stomach. Jesus, he’s packing. Like, I thought I knew before, but this… I lick my lips again and crawl up between his legs, settling there comfortably, and his breath hitches. I just stare up at him. 

I lean up and flick the tip of my tongue against the head of his cock, sliding it easily along the slit, and he’s already struggling to breathe normally, his knuckles white from his grip in the sheets. He bites his lip, worrying it between his teeth, watching me with hazy eyes, so I give him a little show. I swirl my tongue around the head, corners of my lips quirking into a smile, before slowly leaning up to slide his cock between my lips. I suck lightly, swirling my tongue around it, and his eyes flutter shut again. He breathes a soft moan then, stomach tensing, the scores across his abdomen tightening as well. I try not to think about them. Instead I focus on Marco, on bobbing my head over his dick, sliding down further and further with every wet suck. 

There’s no possible way I can take all of this. I reach up to wrap my fingers around whatever isn’t stuffed into my mouth, rubbing gently, and he gives a stuttering moan at that. Fucking _perfect_. I move my head faster, sucking harder, and the soft wet sounds of my movement mesh perfectly with his heavy breathing. I run the nails of my free hand over his thigh, and chills break out over his skin in the most fucking beautiful way. Sucking slowly up his dick, I hollow my cheeks around him, and I swear to god his eyes cross when I lave my tongue over him before pulling off with a pop. He _whimpers_.

Holy shit. 

I sit up on my knees and move to straddle him again, stroking his perfect, beautiful cock with a loose, slow grip. “Hey,” I rasp, reaching down to palm at my own arousal, still trapped in my underwear. He opens his eyes and zeros in on that image, eyebrow twitching again. “Get the lube for me, yeah?” Marco blinks up at me, obviously not with it. I point at the end table with the hand not focused on memorizing every curve of his dick.

He shifts over and starts digging in the drawer. “Where?” I look up at him, digging through the five bajillion wards and charms I’ve stuffed in there over the years in search of the little tube. I know it’s in there.

“Try toward the bottom,” I say before tightening my grip, fingers sliding over spit-slick skin. He shudders under me, thighs tensing, and his rifling pauses before it picks back up with increased urgency. When he finds the tube, he flops onto his back again, looking me up and down. “Thanks,” I mumble, kneeling up and hooking my thumbs in the band of my boxers. This is a pretty great opportunity, so I pause, licking my lips and glancing up at him again. He just raises his eyebrows.

I grin. I can’t help it. Poking my hips out a little, I drag my underwear down teasingly slowly over my cock, until it springs out and arches up toward my stomach, head already slick with precome. I watch as his gaze travels down my body hungrily, until his eyes hit the jewelry glinting in the low light, and he gives this soft, deep groan. He drops the lube and reaches out to grab my hips tight, pulling me up to sit on his ribs, precariously close to his face. Fuck.

“You like that?” He looks up at me as I ask. I lick my lips at the want in his eyes, unable to help the impish smile that crosses my face.

Marco nods, shaking fingers moving to rub against the jewelry carefully. I jolt a little at the touch before arching into it. “Looks different when you’re hard,” he mumbles, and I raise an eyebrow and laugh softly.

“You peepin’ on me, Padre?”

He looks at me again and shakes his head. “Saw it when Levi cut your pants off. Sorry.”

I shake my head, trying not to think too hard about that. The proximity of my dick to his face makes it pretty easy for me. “’S okay.”

Marco pulls me further up his chest, until he can press soft, teasing little kisses over the head of my cock, and _holy fucking shit_ that’s hot. This is too hot. I can’t just sit on Marco’s chest and fuck his mouth and fucking come all over his beautiful freckles, no matter how bad I want to. Self-control, Jean, self-control. Come on.

Kneeling up, tragically away from his beautiful lips, I wriggle until I manage to get my pants down enough over my ass. I lean back and grab the lube, and Marco immediately tugs it out of my hand. “Let me do that,” he rumbles, and I just shiver and nod. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. This man is actually going to kill me. 

He pulls me back to him, and I try not to moan, but it just doesn’t work. The sound of the cap popping open comes from behind me. His dark eyes watch me the whole time he squirts the lube onto his fingers, when he snaps the tube closed again, while he reaches up and presses cold, slick fingers against my entrance, and _fuck_ I can’t take this angle. I’m shaking, biting my lip hard, unable to look away from his face even as he’s spreading the cool liquid around with his equally shaky fingers, and I’m already whimpering and about ready to beg for his cock. This is so unfair.

One hand steadies my hip. I breathe out slowly, relaxing a little, and just as he finally slides the thick tip of one finger into me, his gaze moves to my aching cock, and I’m already about incoherent. _Fuck_. I twitch my hips back, urging him to keep going. He does, sinking his finger deep into me, and my thighs are fucking trembling. His hand moves from my hip to the base of my cock, adjusting it toward him so he can lick broadly over the head—

“ _Fuck_ ,” I whimper, trying not to buck into that, instead reaching down to run my fingers through his hair. “Marco, d-don’t…” He blinks up at me and thrusts his finger gently. I’m fucking dying. “Don’t do that, man, I’ll fuckin’ come all over you…”

A smile crosses his lips, but he listens, letting my cock bounce back up against my abdomen. He runs his hand up and down my chest instead, fingers exploring, while the one inside me moves in all the right fucking ways. Jesus Christ.

Marco pulls his finger back and slides two in together, _achingly_ slow, allowing my body to adjust to the stretching. I know I gotta wait, I gotta be patient, because he’s got a fucking monstrous dick and that thing will split me in half if he doesn’t prepare me properly, but _oh my god I want it in me_. My fingers clench in his hair a little bit, twitching, trying to pick up some of his patience somehow. He’s just watching me, thrusting his fingers into me, a blush spreading dark across his freckles. Fuck.

I’m shaking bad now. My thighs quake under my own weight, struggling to meet the pace of his patient fingers, scissoring and spreading and thrusting inside of me. _Fuck_. He licks his lips, and I watch the motion a little too eagerly. 

“’S tight,” he almost whispers, his eyes worshipping my slowly crumbling body. All I can do is whimper. Even as he slides a third finger in, thrusting deep to spread the lube around, all I can do is pant and whimper and try to tell him without words how bad I fucking need him. Funny how I thought I’d been in control a short while ago.

I can’t take it.

“Enough, e-enough,” I manage, leaning forward on my knees so I can struggle with my pants and get them off. He follows my movement, maddeningly, thrusting deeper and faster into me as I lean over him. I grab the headboard for support, gasping, trying not to rock back against his fingers and failing. I look down at him, and he just watches me, moving at an exquisite pace. “M-Marco, fuck, c’mon…”

“S-sorry,” he mumbles, not looking sorry in the least. “You’re making… a really nice face.”

“’S only gonna get better if you let me—c’mon,” I wriggle impatiently, finally and awkwardly freeing myself from my pants and kicking them to the floor. I lean over to the open drawer and dig around until I find a condom, checking the expiry date like a loser before I rip the damn thing open with my teeth. Marco has yet to stop fucking me on his fingers, but he’s adjusted his wrist so he’s fucking _this close_ to making me completely incoherent. Fuck. I just twitch my hips away from him and scoot down enough to roll the condom onto his (amazing, perfect, fuck-I-need-this) cock. I’m not bothering with his pants. Fuck it. I move over him finally, and he wipes his fingers on the bed before moving to rest his shaking hands on my hips.

I position myself over him, letting out a deep breath. He watches me closely. His teeth worry at his lip, breathing quickly, and I give him a quick half-smile to let him know I’m fucking on to him. I know he needs this as bad as I do.

My hand gripping his hip, I sink down onto him slowly, and _ohhhh. Fuck_.

I’m not entirely sure there are words. My eyes roll shut, my cock fucking _drips_ precome, my breaths are shallow and quick, and the slide down his cock is slow and oh fucking _god_ incredible. He fills me up, impaling me, warm inside me and around me and when I open my eyes his are shut tight, his mouth open, his shaking fingers gripping tight enough to leave white marks in my already pale skin.

“F-fuck,” he whispers harshly as I settle myself against his hips, opening his eyes blearily again. He looks so fucked out, so lost in me. I shake a little as I adjust to the feeling of him inside me.

Maybe a little too soon, I rock my hips against him, but the benefits _far_ outweigh the stinging pain that accompanies the movement. He presses against all the right places deep inside me. Shaking, I lean back and rest my hands on his thighs, and _holy shit_ yeah, that’s the perfect angle, fucking _perfect_. Everything about him is perfect.

When I raise my hips, his nails scratch at my skin just a bit. The look on his face when I sink down is _so_ satisfying. He gives a shuddering breath, twitching, trying to restrain himself, but the nails digging into the small of my back tell me he might be having trouble. I start a slow rhythm just like this, and his cock presses all along all the right places, so I’m seeing stars already.

“M-Marco, Marco, oh my _god_ ,” I manage, rolling my hips down against him, trying to move a little faster. My stitches are starting to complain, though, and I’m _really_ pissed about that, because I want to fucking ride his brains out. I want to slam myself onto his dick and fuck every curse he knows out of his sweet bitten lips. He senses my frustration and sits up, guiding my hips with his hands.

“D-does it hurt?” One hand moves down my bandages, caressing my thigh, before sliding back up to grip my hip tight again. Even as I switch back to a deep, slow grind, rubbing my arousal against his stomach, I try to shake my head, try to deny it. He groans at my movement, moving to suck a deep red mark onto my collarbone, his hands pulling my hips back and forth _hard_ on his cock. The way he’s controlling my movements makes my mouth dry. I let him move me however he wants.

“F-fuck, Marco,” I manage in a shaky moan, my head falling back. I can’t take it. He’s so good, so _good_ , and I want _more_. 

He knows. He pulls me against his chest and, somehow managing to stay inside me, rolls us so that he’s on top. I’m not opposed to the switch. He grinds his dick up into me for a second, while he adjusts us, leaning his weight on one hand above me. His other hand slides tenderly down my bum leg before pulling it against his hip and holding it there safely, securely. 

Fuck.

I rest my other knee against him as well, trapping him between my thighs, and when he finally pulls out of me, almost all the way, my breath catches in my chest. Then he’s sliding back in, so thick and perfect, and I can’t help the whimpering cry that escapes me.

He rolls his hips into me, over and over, keeping this slow, perfectly-timed pace, every thrust coming just as my head comes back out of the clouds to send me even higher. I grasp helplessly at his shoulders. There’s not much else I can do. He’s so perfect, so beautiful, watching me and holding me and breathing my name. All I can do is hold on and moan for him.

Eyes closing briefly with a shuddering groan, Marco thrusts a little harder, just enough, still driving me crazy with his slow, even thrusts, but the little snap to his hips is enough to leave me gasping for more. My nails rake down his back. He just shivers and allows it, hot fingers curling under my knee. 

His other arm comes to loop under my good knee before returning to the sheets, holding his weight and now bending me back in a way that makes his cock hit me fucking _perfect_. If I thought I was seeing stars before, this is a thousand, a million times better. I’m fucking _drooling_. I know I am. I can’t bring myself to care, though. More important is his gasping moan, the way he bites his lip, the way his cock fills me up so _right_.

“Marco,” I manage, my voice cracking just slightly. “Marco, fuck, right _there_.” My moans grow louder, encouraging him, and he leans forward to give me a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss.

“Right there?” He rasps the question against my lips right as his dick answers it for me, and I cry out for him, digging my nails into his shoulders again. “’S it feel good right there?”

 _Fuck_.

Whimpering, I nod, and he thrusts in again so _deep_ and I just can’t fucking handle it. I shake under him, moving my hips back into his, and I’m gasping, pleading with him. “Marco, Marco, _fuck_ … come on, fuck me harder, _Marco, please_ …”

He moans against my jaw, the sound low and shaky, but then he’s obliging, slamming his hips straight up into my sweet spot, and all I can do is hope to hold on. I’m losing my fucking mind. He’s moving faster now, harder, fucking me _so good_ I can’t even hope to think straight. I’m crying out for him, shaking in his arms, arching up against him. I don’t even have the presence of mind to move back against him. I just shake, his hips fucking into me so _fucking_ perfectly.

There’s no way I can last. Not like this. His moans are getting louder, his thrusts harder, and _fuck_ I can feel my orgasm building hot, deep in my gut. 

“Marco, ‘m gonna— _fuck_ —‘m gonna come, god, _ahh_ —“

He leans closer, bending me further, fucking me harder, and the hand holding my cut thigh moves to grasp my hand. He twists our fingers together and presses my hand into the sheets even as his thrusts start to lose their rhythm, but they feel no less amazing. He’s losing control. It’s building, _building_ , my body tight and tense against his, probably fucking _screaming_ , when he whispers against my ear, “J-Jean, come for me, baby, please?” Oh _fuck_. “Please, ‘m so c-close—”

That’s it.

Something snaps and I’m coming harder than I ever have, back arched off the bed, head thrown back against the sheets, and I _know_ I’m screaming in his ear, and he’s moaning in mine, moaning my name, cursing and gasping and literally _fucking_ my orgasm out of me. Every thrust sends me higher, higher, eyes squeezed shut, and I would be coming down from it but he’s fucking _nailing_ my sweet spot with his perfect dick and _god_ —

When he pulls me close, squeezing my hand, and _grinding_ his dick hard and deep in me, he whimpers in my ear, and I can only give him another shaky gasp of his name.

I’m coming down, my heart thundering in my chest, my throat dry, come slick between us. He must be too, because his hips finally come to a stop, and the tiny moans he lets out are breathless and brainless.

We lay like this for a while, my limbs wrapped around him, my free hand still tangled in his hair from god knows when, until he leans up and gives me a deep, fucked-out kiss. Fuck. I just shiver and let him kiss me. My muscles are still twitching from the intensity of my orgasm.

He pulls out of me after a while. I sigh softly, twitching at the feeling. He just releases my limbs and flops over next to me, not too far away. We stare at the ceiling.

I wonder where my cigarettes are. I hate to be stereotypical, but _holy shit_. 

I glance down at my pants on the floor, pack sticking out of my pocket. Great. Must not fall off the bed.

I fall off the bed.

“Fuck,” I mumble, standing on shaking legs long enough to flop back on the bed with my smokes and the ashtray off the nightstand. Marco watches me as I lay on my stomach and light a cigarette.

“Can I have one?”

Raising my eyebrows, I offer the pack to him. He takes one and my lighter, lighting it easily. I move the ashtray between us, and we sit and smoke in silence for a while, until I bury my forehead in my elbow and groan. “What the fuck are they teaching you in seminary?” I peer up at him, laughing a little at the look on his face. It’s a mix between amusement and exasperation. I ash the cigarette and look at him suspiciously. “Seriously, like, iron-clad self-control or something?”

Marco blows smoke at me, eyebrows still raised. “What are you on about?”

“You’re suspiciously good at that.”

“What, am I not supposed to be?”

I snort, inhaling deeply. “Aren’t virgins, you know, shitty at first?”

He laughs, ashing his cigarette and rolling to face me. “What gives you the impression that I’m a virgin?”

All I can do is stare at him, gaping like a fish, and he laughs again, the sound escaping sweet in a cloud of smoke. I just shake my head and don’t answer. Not too interested in that stuff. Grinding out my cigarette, I roll off the bed with slightly more grace this time and move to the bathroom to grab a paper towel. I’m a mess, and I probably got it on the sheet, fuck.

Marco comes in next to me, having lost his pants and boxers at some point. He drops the condom in the trash can. I mop my jizz off his bruised stomach. New lines are forming, I notice, another greyish-pink swelling. I frown and lean down to look at it. It’s a triangle within the circle, the tip pointing downward. Fucking strange. Nervousness coils in my stomach once again.

He just slides his hand over my face, though, and I straighten back up to look at him. He pulls me against him, his body warm, and he kisses me so sweetly that it burns my lips. 

“Mmph,” I manage, before I get too invested. “’S go to bed, okay? I wanna sleep for, like, a week.”

Laughing, he nods, and pulls me back to the bed. He’d already moved the ashtray and gotten rid of the undoubtedly jizz-covered top sheet. I grab the blanket off the floor and climb onto the bed after him, curling close to him and covering us both. He presses gentle kisses to my forehead as he wraps his arms around me and tangles his legs with mine. It’s so warm, cocooned here in his arms. I never want to leave.

\--

I’m already tense when I fall out of bed, landing gracelessly, but I roll into a crouch and instinctively reach for my knife. 

It’s not there, of course.

My brain is on fire. It’s moving a million miles a second, analyzing everything, on edge. I’m sweating. I turn, looking around the dark room. Nothing, no one. Like I believe that.

I reach up and yank the night stand drawer out, pulling the knife taped to the bottom off and gripping it tightly. My heart’s hammering in my chest.

After a moment, though, there really is no movement, no sound, nothing, so I stand and look around again. It’s still dark outside. Reaching up under my jaw, I press two shaking fingers to my pulse and try to take deep breaths. My blood is pounding through my veins. Adrenaline still spikes in my muscles. I tap the knife irritably against my bare thigh a few times before it occurs to me that this probably isn’t that smart.

Sighing, I dump the knife on the end table and rake my fingers through my sweaty, tangled hair. It still feels dirty and gritty.

While I’m in the shower, and while it’s still hot, I have time to think. All the thinking I should have fucking done at any point before I let myself destroy _everything_.

Too much time.

\--

Marco wakes up at like noon. As usual. I’ve been dressed since I woke up around three or so. I’m searching through my books for a distraction, but I don’t actually own any books on the shit I exterminate. Probably because I’m a fucking dumbass.

My hands shake, but he’s too out of it to notice yet, his hair going crazy in all directions.

“Go take a shower,” I mumble, flipping through a psychopharm textbook from when I was still in grad school. It offers me little comfort. Marco grunts and stumbles into the bathroom. I try not to watch him as he goes, still stark-naked. 

Acetylcholine, glutamate, catecholamines. Acetylcholinesterase, glutamine synthetase, monoamine oxidase. Chemical, enzyme. Functional, breakdown. Marco, me.

Fuck you, brain.

I slam the book shut and dig the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see a million dark little stars and my busted-ass nose nearly gives me a migraine. It’s been like this for _hours_. The envelope sits thick in my back pocket, folded in half and waiting.

Marco comes out, hair in a half-dry disarray, towel around his waist, significantly more awake. The triangle on his stomach is fully dark now, and the symbol carved in black over his guts is sinister somehow, even on Marco’s (sweet, beautiful, ama--) body. I swallow and stare at the coffee table.

He stands across from me. I can feel his eyes on me, boring into me, but I ignore it.

“Were you up all night?”

I shrug. Try to look casual. Wait until this shit in my eye passes. I sniff and lean back onto the couch, fingers laced in my lap.

I can’t.

“Get dressed, we got stuff to do,” I lie, already standing and cramming my last bent cigarette between my lips. He raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t reply, just moving to obey me.

In half the time it takes him to put clothes on, I’m already done my cigarette and jittering for another. Sliding Pixis’s phone into my pocket without looking at it, I haul our hoodies back out of the closet, because whatever fucking crackhead is altering the weather these days has decided that we need another day far below freezing. Marco doesn’t question me when he slides it over his shoulders.

We stop at the corner store. Joe isn’t there. _La princesa_ from Marco’s first day with me a thousand years ago pops her gum at me and doesn’t give me any lip this time. I grunt appreciatively.

There are four blocks between my apartment and the subway. I smoke three and a half cigarettes in that time. If Marco notices my sudden transformation into a chimney, he doesn’t say anything.

He does cough a lot, though. I wonder if it’s the cigarette or if he’s finally getting a cold from the fucking on-off-on-again game the temperature is playing.

My heart is hammering in my chest. I can feel my unease in my veins all the way down through my fingers, like a tightening of muscles that have never been tightened. It’s uncomfortable. I want to fidget, but I can’t fidget more than I already am, so I just deal with it.

We walk onto the platform. My mouth is dry. I stare at the floor.

Just do it.

Marco coughs into his elbow, looking out over the tracks. It’s cold as shit.

My hands are already moving for the envelope. I hold it out to him. He stares at me.

“What’s this?”

There’s a mile of space between us. I stare at the floor. “Take it.”

He does. I hear a rustle, then an uncomfortable sound that gets whipped up into a good coughing fit, muffled by his elbow. “Jean,” he manages after a while, “What is this?”

“Money.”

“Why?”

“Take it. Get on this train, take it to 30th St station. Get on an Amtrak. Go as far as you can. Anywhere. Wherever sounds nice.” I shove my hands in my pockets, not looking at him yet. He’s sputtering again, coughing. Tears well up in my eyes, and I don’t have the strength to force them away, so I just stare at his dirty chucks.

“Why?”

I have to. I have to. I feel like I’m breaking.

I steel myself and look up at him, my face an expression of laziness. “It’ll get you away from me. Out of my hair. So I can work, you know.” Marco, please. Please see through me. I’m dying. I can feel myself cracking. The feeling of despair creeps up into my throat from my aching heart.

He stares at me. He doesn’t try to fight his tears. They slide down his cheeks as he takes a step back, his fingers reaching up to tug at his hair. He stares at the opposite platform. Marco, Marco, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ —

But you can’t be near me.

Please hate me.

He’s coughing again, harder, covering his mouth with his hand. The one not crumpling the envelope in a white-knuckled grip. I watch him, my chest a chasm, and before I can open my cracked lips to ask if he’s okay, he straightens up and stares right out over the tracks again.

My mouth is dry.

“He fights so hard,” Marco says finally, his voice low and gravelly. “But one little crack,” he continues, looking down at his shaking palms. He’d dropped the envelope. I can see the twitching tremor moving through him from here. Marco clenches his fists slowly, experimentally. “One little crack in his resolve is all I needed,” he murmurs.

He looks back up over the tracks and exhales slowly. The air comes out as thick black smoke, hovering briefly before being tossed aside by the frigid breeze signaling the coming train.

My breath leaves me too, like a punch to the gut. My feet are frozen to the ground what feels like ten thousand miles down.

Marco turns to me and smiles. I’ve never seen so much cruelty crushed between someone’s teeth before, and it shines like blood on his lips. 

“He hasn’t felt like this in a long time,” he continues. “And now he’s trapped in here with me.” The smile widens, and it twists Marco’s face. His right pupil is blowing out wide, over the hematoma, taking over impossibly. Black mire collects at the corner of his eye. It smells like burning. “I think you know what’ll happen to him. Right?”

The train roars by us, the cold air deafening in my ears. My arms hang numb at my sides. Marco’s mismatched eyes widen.

He lunges at me.

My feet are frozen.


	9. Hymns For The Damned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's unexpected every step of the way, but I have to move forward. I can't sink into the darkness. I'll find a way to you, Marco.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

Whatever is inside Marco fists his hand in my hoodie, hauling me close. The acrid smoke pouring from his lungs stinks like burning tar. He laughs, the sound loud and cold and nothing like Marco, and turns, superhuman strength flinging me off the platform. I miss the back of the moving train by a fraction of an inch. It hurtles down the tunnel as if nothing had happened.

I crash into the metal supports dividing the tracks, and it knocks my breath out of me.

The fall to the wet floor a few feet down seems to last forever. My head cracks off the hot metal of the subway tracks, the scabbed-over skin above my eye splitting yet again.

First, only pain.

Then, deep, icy fear.

Marco’s laughing, jumping off the platform, and his shoes splash dirty water from a puddle over me. I can’t look at him. I can’t look at him and see that malice.

I can’t look into his face and let those beautiful freckles be the last thing I see before he guts me with a laugh.

I pull myself into a crouch and swing my good leg out at his knees. He doesn’t budge, impossibly strong against my frantic strike. I jump backwards, into the tracks on the other side of the support, then bolt down the tunnel. Gotta find a safe spot. Tracks aren’t safe.

Follow me, Marco, come on.

I try not to trip as I jump along the slippery tracks, my eyes peeled for some kind of side room, a ladder, _anything_. 

“At least he’s stronger than my last meat sack,” Marco’s voice calls. Loud, boisterous, taunting… not Marco. “The last one just stroked out and died while I was still inside him!” Closer now. I run faster. He’s after me, and I can feel his hatred pouring out of him like a hurricane down these tunnels. It’s so dark down here, the dim orange lights throughout the tunnel essentially useless. 

His voice comes out suddenly from a blown-out hole in the wall, crumbling brick giving way to an ancient tile tunnel, flimsily sectioned off with yellow caution tape and millions of cobwebs. “Oh, it _is_ dark in here,” he breathes, his voice tight like it’s being choked out of him. “Sweet little Reverend Marco, hiding his anger behind his faith in a false god.” I sprint faster, ignoring him desperately. He’s playing with me. I can’t let him, I can’t let him get to me, not here. It’s dark, so dark. I can see a light far ahead. I don’t know that I can make it. Moving across the wooden tracks is treacherous, unsteady, slowing me down.

Then Marco’s in front of me. I skid to a stop and fall on my ass, scrambling backwards. I squint up at him, trying to see his face, but it’s hidden in shadow. My breath heaves out of me. His posture is so foreign, shoulders tight, spine bent, hands hanging like claws at his side. He steps toward me, every muscle taut. 

“You don’t sleep much anymore, do you?”

Don’t listen. Don’t listen. He’s _fucking_ with me, and I know better, but I hang on Marco’s every word because it’s his voice, but it’s so fucking _wrong_. Someone help me, please god help me.

I manage to get my feet under me, putting my hand up defensively, but I can’t bring myself to reach for my knife. Not against him. 

“How do you know you’re not going crazy, Jean?” Marco’s voice is sweet, but underneath it’s rotting. “How do you know any of this is real?”

“Stop,” I growl, shifting back carefully until there’s a few feet between us. Fear is boiling into anger. “Don’t fucking use his lips to spew your bullshit.”

Marco laughs, choked and grating, and phases closer to me. He’s in my face, standing over me, eyes horribly wide, black spreading further as his left eye pales sickly. The punch he levels into my gut is expected, but it fucking hurts regardless, and I cough out my foggy breath in his face. I can’t even bring my hands to really defend myself against him. 

“How do you know we’re not one and the same?” He punches me again, in the side, and I’m pretty sure I feel a rib crack under the force of it. _Fuck_. Sharp pain freezes my brain for a second, my lungs empty and screaming for air. I bend over the impact, gasping, reaching lamely for his hands. “Maybe I’ve been this way the whole time.” 

Don’t listen. Don’t listen. He leans down to me again, his fingers digging into my sides cruelly and pulling me close to him. I give a strangled sound as he grinds his nails into the dip where a whole rib is supposed to be, pushing around fragments and grating my muscles against the bony shards. His filthy lips travel over my bloody brow, tongue tasting the blood pouring out of the gaping slice there before he moves his stained lips down my face again.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he purrs against my cheek, in the same voice Marco fucked me with last night. I can feel the hellish grin twisting his sweet face against mine. “We’re all quite mad here.”

I can’t take it. I kick out hard against his knee, feeling the joint shatter backwards, _hearing_ the crunch and snap of everything breaking. He doesn’t even grunt. He just laughs, smoky and deep in my mouth. I spin away from him, then bring my elbow up hard into the back of his skull. He goes down. Thank fucking god.

I’m bolting again, aiming for the flickering yellow light, desperate and entirely sure that I’m going crazy. Gotta save it. Save it. Go crazy later. Marco first. Gotta get somewhere safe. Somewhere safe. Follow me.

I hear the clanging of claws against metal, the sound tinny and sharp over the fucking _whispers_ that are echoing through the tunnels. Where are they coming from? They sliver venomously into my ears. The crawling sensation deep in my brain returns. Then another loud _clang_ , and a scrabbling sound of shoes on slick steel. He’s fucking climbing the supports. He swings from pole to pole in the darkness, sliding and scraping and _laughing_. His movements sound jerky, unnatural, like he’s fighting himself.

Keep fighting.

I sprint down the tunnel until I find a tiny stone staircase that leads up to a dingy door, hidden deep in a tagged-up black concrete recess. I rip it open and fall inside. It slams loudly behind me.

“Fuck,” I mumble, scrambling to my feet and taking in my surroundings. Three workers playing poker stare up at me, eyebrows raised.

One of them opens his mouth to say something, and I open my mouth to cut him off, and the door behind me dents inward in a deafening screech of metal that knocks me forward, back onto my face. The guys are already scattering toward a hallway at the back of the locker room. I roll onto my back and scuttle backward, away from the door, just as another collision knocks it wide open. The heavy, broken metal swings lamely off of the bottom hinge. It booms against the wall, a huge crack shooting up through the bricks, and clatters against the floor with a shriek and a crash.

Marco strolls in, cracking his wrist. He reaches up, lacing his fingers tightly, and the sickening _crunch_ of joints being popped back into place fills the air. He doesn’t even fucking blink. The fingers on his right hand are bruised now, blackened from having to exert so much more force than any one human should be able to put out. He’s walking like his knee isn’t broken, like blood and bone fragments aren’t smeared all over his torn, dirty pants.

“Fuck off,” I spit, using the bench between the lockers to haul myself to my feet. My legs are shaking. “You wanna get rid of me, just _do_ it, don’t involve him.”

Marco blinks at me, then smiles again. His teeth are stained dark with blood. “You’re a fucking moron,” he says, right before he’s lunging at me again. I slam a locker door open in his face, mentally apologizing for the loud _bang_ the metal makes as it crashes against Marco’s nose. I turn then, stumbling, and run back along the lockers, sliding around the corner toward the hallway. Marco moves slow behind me, laughing, always laughing. The sound chills me to the bone.

The hallway leads out to the next station stop. I burst out of the door hidden in the painted wall, sprinting along the platform, but Marco’s taunts follow me. Too closely. His feet collide _hard_ with my back and drop me like nothing. Stupid. I land and roll to face him, trying and failing to get away from his dark, looming presence. He drops over me from a pipe in the low ceiling, one foot landing square in my gut. I cough, curling up over my stomach, and he grinds his heel into my organs ruthlessly with a dry laugh.

“I don’t want you, Kirschtein,” Marco hums. I cough again, the wet tang of blood spreading through my mouth. I think I bit my tongue at some point. It’s going numb, and my mouth keeps filling up with blood, which bubbles uselessly out of the corner of my mouth and down my jaw. 

The roar of an incoming train fills the air around us, preceded by frozen winds. Marco looks up, his hair ruffling in the breeze, before grinning back down to me, his huge eyes narrowing. The right is completely black now, his left paling over to white. “You just made everything so much easier,” he continues. A cold chill seeps into my battered gut. The train rolls into the station. With one last good kick to my ribs, he turns and stalks through the open doors. My mind is blank from pain, stars covering my vision as I gasp desperately to fill my broken lungs. 

People on the car look down, wide-eyed, trying to pretend he doesn’t exist. The blood, the eyes, the stench, and I’m noticing now that black ooze is leaking, dripping down from under his shirt. Probably from the shit it had scratched into his flesh from inside of him.

I roll onto my side, incapable of getting up yet, jaw slack and bloody. He looks at me as the doors close with a loud beep, the muffled announcement reciting the next station.

Marco reaches up and presses his bruised, broken hand to the glass window. His ring finger bends at an awkward angle. Tar smears from his fingertips.

The train moves away, but I feel his eyes on me until it’s long gone.

\--

I go to a dark place then. Just like Marco. Terrified, alone, and so _fucking angry_. It scares me even more, this towering, shaking, boiling rage. My heart hammers against my ribs. All I hear is my thundering pulse pushing thick blood through my skull. All I see is blackness. I smell his tar, his vile breath like it’s burned into my sinuses. 

I’m alone for a long time. I don’t think. I just scream.

When I come out of it, I’m wet and cold. It’s dark now, the sun’s last rays long gone. Blood is caked on my face from the cut above my eye, smeared with saliva around my eyebrow. I’m sore. Did I run here? Where am I?

It’s snowing. I stare up at glowing red circles.

Target.

I know what I’m here for.

I stride through the doors into the sickening brightness. Armin’s at the register, and he’s calling out to me, voice shaking, terrified by my appearance. I ignore him. Long steps take me to the back room, quiet and chilly and huge with boxes piled up to the ceiling along the metal shelves. 

The fake red emergency box crookedly nailed to the back wall is gathering dust by this point. The sealed door reads in peeling red capitals, “IN CASE OF ZOMBIES BREAK GLASS.” I put my covered elbow through the glass, shattering it before I reach inside to pull the catch that opens the squeaky metal door. I yank the fake plastic fire axe off the hooks. My fingers trace along the top of the peeling metal until I find the indent and yank the fake back of the gag emergency box out, revealing a very real, very loaded handgun.

“Are you fucking stupid?”

I freeze for just a second, then grab the gun and turn to Levi. He’s _bristling_ behind me, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. I reach over to the switch next to the huge loading bay door and flip it down, silently deactivating the smoke alarms. Erwin’s a genius with wiring, among many other things. I hold my hand out, and regardless of his building rage, Levi hands me his pack. I don’t give it back.

“I told you that you couldn’t,” he says evenly, lighting his cigarette. I take the lighter from his hand. He sounds calm, but I know he’s far from it. “You _knew_ you’d have to kill him if shit went downhill.”

I light a cigarette and stare blankly down at Levi. He’s so little. The gun is heavy in my fingers, my cigarette hanging loose between my lips. I’m honestly surprised my eyes are even close to focused. My mind is drowning, my thoughts thick and slow. It’s like my skull is full of cotton. It obscures my thoughts and leaves me congested. I tighten my lips around the filter and pull in deep. The clotted blood on my brow feels tight.

“Was it worth it?” He blows smoke up at me, the crease between his eyebrows deepening. His right eye is bloodshot. Migraine. I’d tell him to calm down, but the smoke filling my chest is too pressing. It won’t come out. I exhale, and exhale, and exhale, and it won’t come out. “Was it worth telling him you love him, and then having to watch him being ridden around by this bitch?”

The smoke won’t come out. My eyes are burning. Definitely from the smoke pouring into my dried-out brain, not from the tears filling them. I pull in even more smoke. Maybe if I pull enough in it’ll push my thoughts out and leave me an empty shell.

He lets out a shaky exhale and grinds the heels of his palms against his temples. Migraine’s getting worse. It might be enough to knock him out. I exhale smoke, but it doesn’t leave me.

The gun is heavy in my fingers. 

“You may as well have said it,” Levi spits, digging my half-formed protest out of my skull with his pounding mind. “Same fucking difference with you. Moron.”

I blink slowly at him. Ashes drop off the end of my cigarette and flutter to the cold floor.

“What now?” The question is short, grated out between his grinding teeth. His nose is bleeding pretty heavily. Blood drips down his chin and onto the floor, dyeing the concrete with little droplets. Migraine.

I suck another good inhale off the cigarette, then let it drop to the floor from my slack lips. I don’t bother crushing it out. I just stare.

“Kill the vessel,” I mumble, my voice choked and thick with disuse. “Whatever’s inside goes back down.”

“Can you do it?” He grinds out his cigarette and wipes the blood pouring down his face on his sleeve. His eye is heavily bloodshot now. It’s nothing on what Marco’s looked like. “Can you put a bullet in the priest’s brain?”

I sigh, staring up at the ceiling. The lights are bright. Tears pour over my face and down my neck. The lights are so bright. They burn.

“No, Jean,” Levi manages, struggling against the pounding in his skull. “Those bullets— _fuck_ —aren’t for you.”

Eren bursts into the backroom then, immediately rushing over to Levi. “Christ,” he mutters, taking the psychic’s head in his hands and leaning close to stare at him. “Levi, again?”

Levi’s eyes don’t leave me, even as Eren pinches his nose and forcibly leans his head forward. I stare back down at him.

“Those bullets aren’t for you,” he repeats slowly, and Eren stares from the gun to me and back again. His eyes widen along with his big mouth.

I’m already moving. I’m running, faster, faster, sprinting through the bright, neatly-kept aisles. My heart pounds in my chest. People scatter out of my way, probably because I’m still holding the gun in plain sight. As I run out the front doors, I hear Armin yelling after me, cursing, calling my name, but I don’t care. I’m not listening. I bolt into the parking lot and turn north, toward Marco’s church, toward the rift. He’s gotta be there.

Dark houses fly by me. I sprint through southern Trost, running in the streets, my stitches screaming, but I don’t care anymore. They could be ripping through my flesh and I wouldn’t care. I just don’t give a shit. Nothing matters to me except the gun in my hand and the sweet, beautiful mouth I’m going to shove it into.

There’s a loud, screaming chirp coming from my pocket. Pixis’s phone. Skidding to a halt and sliding in the snow, I look up at the street signs to orient myself. I answer the phone just to stop its wretched cries.

“What.”

“Dude,” comes Connie’s voice, loud and stern, so different from the last time we’d talked. “Jean, what the fuck is going on? Armin just called and said you hauled ass out of the Target with a _gun_.”

“Connie,” I start, breathless. I didn’t know how much my lungs were screaming until I’d stopped running. I take a left and start jogging again before I remember that I’m on the phone. “Connie, don’t do this right now. I’ll explain later.”

“No, fuck you, you explain _now_ ,” he bites. I’m about to protest, or hang up, when his voice comes through again. “Fuck, Sash, there he is, there he is!”

I’m confused. Until a car screeches up onto the sidewalk in front of me. I grind to a halt, gun ready, my finger on the safety. Connie jumps out of the passenger seat, his hands reaching out to grab my hoodie. He swings me then, so much stronger than when we were younger, and he slams me against the car. The jolt knocks some of the fuzz loose so I can think. My eyes are wide, staring at his dark face.

“Jean,” he yells, trying to get my scattered attention. Sasha’s next to him, her back to us, keeping watch. Her hands are wrapped tight around… 

“Is that a crossbow?” The question leaves my mouth before I think. She turns to me, then shrugs.

“Quieter than a gun.”

Connie slams me against the car again. I glare at him. “Jean, what the _fuck_ are you doing, running around south Trost with a fucking handgun? Are you on drugs? Have you actually gone crazy?”

“You don’t get it,” I growl, my hands shaking at my sides.

“I don’t _get_ it?” Connie throws his hands in the air, then scrubs his palms against his closely-shaved head. “I get it more than anyone else, you ass. I’ve known since you first started in tenth grade.” I stare at him, incredulous. “Yeah. I hate to tell you this now, Jean, but you are a bad fucking liar.”

“Wait… you…?”

“Yeah,” Connie grunts, lacing his fingers on top of his head. He shifts his weight agitatedly. “Sasha’s family’s been doing this for _years_. I found out pretty fast that the monsters under the bed are real.” He sighs and rubs his hands down his face. Sasha checks behind us, eyes alert and searching, face more serious than I’ve seen in a long time. “We’ve been doing it too.”

I just stare, unable to form a response. This is insane. I never even fucking picked up on it. I reach up and press my hands against the sides of my head. The gun’s metal is cold and hard against my skin. My head is clearing now, rational thought returning, and I have the presence of mind to shove the gun into the back of my pants. Bad place to put a gun, but I don’t have much of a choice.

“What are you doing running around with a gun?” Connie asks me again, more calmly. Sasha throws her crossbow into the backseat and turns to us, crossing her arms.

I sigh. With rational thought comes depression, comes guilt, comes the crushing pressure on my ribs. It aches, it aches so badly, and not just because one’s busted inward. I shakily light another cigarette, grateful for the rush of nicotine that calms my rising panic.

“It’s Marco,” I manage, unable to look at either of them. It’s my fault. They know it, they have to. “He got taken.”

“By Melinoë,” Connie says, and I stare at him again. I’m drawing a total blank. He waves away the cigarette smoke that I accidentally let out into his face. “We’ve been talking to Hanji. They didn’t tell you?”

I shake my head, then pull out Pixis’s phone again. A hundred texts, half that many missed calls, a dozen voicemails. Shit. Hanji’s name pops up multiple times, six times in the past twelve hours. How did I miss it? Where did I go?

“Come on,” Connie says, sliding back into the passenger seat. “We’ll explain on the way.”

I drop into the backseat, pushing aside Sasha’s incredibly heavy crossbow to do so. She steps around to the driver’s seat and fastens herself in, quickly maneuvering the car off the sidewalk and back onto the street.

“Okay,” Connie says, turning to me. I ash my cigarette out the rolled-down window. “So Melinoë is a Greek underworld nymph. She’s basically in charge of kissing ghost asses and getting them from this plane to Styx when Greece is up. Oh, and driving people on this plane bonkers with night terrors.” Joy. Connie flicks through a few pages of notes in Hanji’s messy, ambidextrous scrawl. “Greece ain’t up, but she is, so that’s a problem. She’s pushing Ragnarok.”

“But she’s out of order,” I interject, scooting to the edge of my seat. Sasha turns around a corner, acting cool in front of the cop across the intersection. “The weather’s wrong, and no one else is up.”

“Yeah,” Connie continues, rubbing his nose. “I don’t know what she’s doing, but it’s bad. Real bad. She’s out of her cycle and way more powerful than she should be.”

“So what, she’s using Marco to open it up and start shit herself? Why?”

“I said, man, no idea. It’s not like she writes this stuff down.”

“What did Ilse say about it?”

Connie shrugs. “The _Edda_ was mostly just incoherent warnings, Ilse trying to reason through why Muspelheim was waking up without Surt or anyone else. And the other journal’s just talking about this frost giant Ymir, not too related. I don’t think. Hanji’s just starting that one, so who knows.”

I rub my hand over my face and groan loudly. My head hurts. I don’t get _any_ of this, and to be honest, I don’t care. I just want Marco out of it, however I can manage it.

I lean back against the seat and stare up at Connie. He watches me, then reaches around and pats my knee roughly. “We’ll get him back, man,” he says quietly. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I have it figured out,” I spit, needlessly venomous but very cranky. Frozen air still floods the car. I take the last drag off my forgotten cigarette, dumping ash all over myself and Sasha’s car, before I flick it out the window and roll it back up. “It’s figured out, Connie.”

“Yeah?” He turns to me more, against his seatbelt, his brow furrowed. “You just gonna charge into Muspelheim with a Glock and a dream? You really have lost it, Jean.”

“Hey, fuck you,” I shout, punching the back of his headrest. It jolts his seat. “I’m gonna find him, and I’m gonna fucking plug him, and then I’m not gonna come home.” Connie stares at me, his expression darkening. “If I have to go in there, I’ll fucking close that shit from that side. You guys can handle this side. Don’t get involved more than you have to.”

“Jean, we’re _already_ involved!” He’s unbuckling his seatbelt, moving toward me, fisting his hand in my hoodie again. He gives me a good rattle. It takes all the self-control I have to not punch him in his fucking face. “We’ve _been_ involved, all of us, ever since it started! And just because you were at ground zero doesn’t mean you’re responsible, so _knock off_ the stupid guilt spiral shit! It makes you useless and stupid.”

I glare at him, bile rising in my throat. He’s wrong. I must be responsible, I have to be. I took Marco home and I put that shit in him and then I brought it out with my stupid fucking decisions, with my paranoid fears. Every muscle in my body is tense, sore, so I punch the back of his seat a few more times. It doesn’t settle the energy crackling through me.

Sasha jerks the steering wheel and pulls badly into a parking space before she whips around to stare at me, her expression dark. “Stop, Jean,” she says, and against myself I shrink. “You too, Con’.” She shoots a glare at Connie, and he has the good grace to shrivel as well. “You’re both being stupid. We need to focus, because right now it’s just the three of us, and Melinoë is moving. She has Marco, and that’s all she needs, if Hanji’s right.” She runs a hand through her messy bangs. I see her simple, pretty engagement ring sparkle on her narrow finger, just a little loose. “We don’t have time for your macho guilt party crap. Think about the job instead.”

I stare at my shoes, thoroughly admonished. Connie mumbles an apology, though whether it’s to Sasha or me is unclear.

“We’re going in with you if need be, Jean,” she says then. I look up at her, refusal dying on my lips as she levels me with a hard stare. “All you have is a gun, and you’re heading right into their playground. We don’t know what they’re like there. You’re gonna need all the help you can get, or you’re just gonna die like a moron.”

Just like I lived, no one says but everyone is thinking. 

We’re silent as we resume our journey to Marco’s church. The gun presses uncomfortably into the small of my back. It’s hard, unfamiliar, not at all like my knife, which has been missing since I woke up. Maybe before I went down, who knows. 

“Connie,” I rasp, voice itchy in my throat before I clear it. “You got any info on how she’s gonna manage this?”

“No,” he mumbles, flipping through Hanji’s scant notes again. “All I know is that something’s giving her power she shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“Necromancy, for one,” he sighs. “She’s using the spirits to hatch titans instead of sending them downstairs where they belong. If Hades was up, he’d be salty. She’s abusing her privileges.”

“The doors,” I say, and the weird room in Pixis’s condo suddenly makes sense. Connie’s nodding in the front seat. I continue, talking fast to keep up with my reeling brain. “She’s redirecting them. That’s how she got a group of them on me.” I scratch a hand over my scalp again, ruffling my tangled hair. “What’s she gonna do with Marco, then?”

Connie shakes his head. “I don’t know. Hanji wrote something about… suicide?”

“Oh, fuck, yeah. That.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t need to.

We’ve been stopped again for a while, I notice, and Sasha’s turned and looking between us. She bites her lip and thinks. I look out the window at the church, looming in the darkness. “What if…” I look back at her. She pauses and hums. “Did Melinoë ever talk to you about him?”

I shudder. Shit I’d rather not think about. I light another cigarette, rolling the window down a few inches. “Just about some darkness inside him…” I strain my memory. Something else… “Oh, she said they’ve been ‘fucking with him for years’ or something.”

Sasha reaches over, taking a page of the notes. Connie blinks at her. She squints at it, turns it upside down, then hands it to me.

‘ _suicide not his, came back how_ ,’ read looping, tangled letters. My brow furrows. I’m trying to focus, trying so hard. Came back how…

“Connie, you said she’s got necromancy now?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck me,” I sigh, pulling deep off my cigarette. Ashes fall on me again. “She fucked with Marco.” I’m getting angry. I spit out smoke and quickly replace it. “She fucked with him until he killed himself, then fucking necromancied him back into his body and sent him away from Jinae.”

“Why? It seems pointless, except for shits and giggles.” I look up at Connie. He continues, “I mean, I don’t know much except what Erwin told me, but she sat in Pixis for god knows how long without any issues. He doesn’t exactly seem like the suicide type.”

I shake my head. “She said he stroked out. She was riding his corpse.”

“Gross.”

I don’t get it. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes for what feels like a millionth time. Everything is swirling in my brain, flushing uselessly and falling back on circular logic. I look out at Marco’s innocuous church again, breathing out smoke. Anger’s filling my stomach. I’m not sure that it’s a good replacement for the anxiety, but it’s certainly more motivating. “Let’s go ask her,” I growl, unable to keep the distaste out of my words.

Looking back at Sasha, then Connie, I flick my cigarette out and pull the gun out of my ass. They look at each other, staring into each other’s eyes, and my stomach turns a little. I get out of the car before my guilt and despair make me puke all over them.

The cold air stings against my face, but it settles my stomach. I grind my teeth. The door to the church is only closed over. Marco’s already come, it looks like.

My chest hurts, and my lungs are about to give up on me, but I light another cigarette. Dead man walking anyway. I look down at the gun in my hand, not looking up at Sasha and Connie as they get out of the car and come to stand next to me. Sasha’s grip is tight on her crossbow, the bolts in a satchel hanging from her shoulder. Connie’s got these long, sharp box-cutter looking swords. I shake my head, somewhere between disbelief and admiration. 

Connie hands one of his swords to me. I blink up at him, then accept it gratefully. Guns only have so much ammo. I’m better with a blade anyway.

“You ready?” Connie’s voice is quiet in the cold, dark air. I stare up at the moon, peeking through the clouds. The snow is intermittent now, but the bone-deep chill won’t let up. 

“As much as I can be,” I mutter, striding up the crunchy, snowy path to the door.

The narthex is dark, silent. I lead with the gun, watching carefully for movement in the shadows. I step in, trying to be silent, but the ice sticking to the bottom of my shoes crackles and crunches loudly. I wince. 

“Where is it?” I turn to Sasha, who had breathed the question in my ear. I jerk my chin toward the stairs tucked in the corner. She sets her jaw, crossbow ready, and stalks quickly toward the stairs. Her steps are admirably silent, more than can be said for either me or Connie. We crunch and crackle and then finally pad over to the shitty metal gate. The chocolate ward I’d drawn on the wood is still there. I wonder if the gaki’s still in there or if it fell into more trouble than it anticipated down there.

“It’s probably in the main vault,” I whisper. “There’s a few down there, and they’ve all got shit in them. We’re looking for the big, ugly one. Bad mojo.”

They nod. I exhale slowly. I unhook the gate and silently pull it open, slow and hesitant. The narrow stairs sink down into the gloom.

The wooden door sits untouched, save for the splintered wood where the padlock and catch were ripped away. The metal latch sits in the dusty corner, having broken the cobwebs gathering there. I stare at it, imagining Marco grabbing the closed lock and then ripping it away with a snort, his hand black and shriveled.

Not now. I shake my head. Guilt makes me stupid, guilt makes me stupid. Remember.

Connie puts his hand on my shoulder. I twitch back to glance at him. He nods reassuringly. I sigh and stare back at the ward, then pull the sliding door open as quietly as I can. Which is not very, with the way it grits through the dirt in the track.

The crypt is dark and cold, no lights to cast shadows. Connie aims a flashlight through the darkness, one I hadn’t noticed him carrying. His grip firms around his sword, fingers stretching and adjusting before clenching around the hilt again. The beam sweeps around the dingy basement, dust motes catching in the light and shining like embers, and I poke my head in the door. It’s silent. No moans, no chewing, no sounds of any kind. Just pressing silence, insistent and thick. I step down the creaky wooden stairs onto the dirt floor, breaths shallow and shaky.

I point wordlessly toward the main vault, the door still hanging open. He nods. Sasha aims her crossbow toward it, looking down the sights, her finger stretched out next to the trigger. My grip around the gun is sweaty. I adjust it, my thumb moving to the safety. The sword in my left hand feels so much more secure, so much more protective, even if it’s longer and thicker and more awkward than I’m used to.

We creep single-file toward the main vault. The heavy doors don’t move, not one of them. No movement at all, no whispers in the dark. Connie’s flashlight is steady, pointed at the vault. My heart is beating so hard I swear I can hear it thudding through the dusty air.

“Your breathing is loud,” comes a too-familiar deadpan from inside the vault. I start, aiming the gun seriously. Connie shifts to the left, and his light falls on—

Annie Leonhardt.

Wait, what?

Shaking my head, I aim the gun right at her face. I don’t trust her, no fucking way. Not here.

“I’m not possessed.” She comes out of the vault and into the light. There’s blood on her shirt and her unzipped hoodie is torn, but there aren’t any wounds on her exposed skin. Her hair is a mess. “Stop shining that in my eyes.”

Connie aims the beam upward a little to shed light on the scene. Annie stares up at me. I notice a smear of blood along her jaw. I don’t lower the gun. “What are you?”

She sighs and pulls her hair out of its messy bun, moving to retie it tighter, more out of her face. “Fire titans aren’t the only titans with a role to play.”

“I’m impatient, Annie,” I snarl, clicking the safety off. My finger lays out next to the trigger. “Give me a good reason to not shoot you in the fucking face.”

“I tried to stop him.” I stare at her. That’s not a great reason. “But with that bitch in him, he was too strong. He overpowered me and got in.” Looking at her makes my heart rate pick up. How long has she been here? 

“Still not a good reason.”

“You’ll need my help if you want to get to the priest,” she says, her hands moving to her hoodie pockets. 

“Tell me how.”

“Put the safety back on.”

I stare at her. She stares back. Connie and Sasha are tense behind me, but they’re lowering their weapons, unable to aim at a friend’s face. I count to three slowly, breathing deeply, then click the safety back on and relax my arm. 

She sighs as I stuff the gun back in my pants and light a cigarette. “There are different kinds of titans. Melinoë’s pushing the fire titans. The frost titans are a more… neutral force.”

“Bullshit,” I spit, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

She ignores me. “We have our reasons for keeping Melinoë from wiping the planet.”

“’We?’”

She nods, but doesn’t continue. I huff, taking another drag. Annie’s the worst. 

But she’s also dangerous, and that’s a quality I’m prepared to accept. “What’s the plan?”

Annie cracks her neck, and a tiny smirk crosses over her face. Her hands come out. The air gets colder, pressure pulling toward her fists, and a crystalline coating of ice covers her knuckles. Her eyes, already dead blue, pale in color. It’s _freezing_ around her. I smoke idly, and a grin spreads across my cheeks in spite of myself. 

If nothing else, this should be exciting. My adrenaline’s already going.

“We waiting on anyone else?”

Annie shrugs. I turn back to Sasha and Connie, who shake their heads, looking a little clammy. This might be kind of out of their league, even with experience. I grin wider.

Maybe I really am going crazy.

“Alright, how do we get in?”

I grind out my cigarette and pull my gun out, clicking the safety back off. My left hand grips the sword, readying it. Annie turns back into the vault and gives the cracking, ancient chair in the middle a good punt. It shatters against the wall. The splinters start to fall to the ground, then freeze in midair. I suck in a breath.

The wall cracks. It’s loud, and dust shakes down from the ceiling. The hovering chair pieces tremble. The crack in the wall forces itself open in jerky, crunching tugs, spreading wider and wider. A mighty wind blows out of the opening, dry and loud and hot, stinging my eyes and my mouth. I spread my feet against the push and squint against the dust flying around us.

The other side of the widening gap is fiery, flashing like lightning and howling, the ground craggy like Mars. Annie ducks into the gap, gesturing behind herself for us to follow.

I dive in without a second thought.

\--

It’s _hot_.

It’s so fucking hot. I’m sweating. My mind is foggy again, my stomach twisting. The difference in pressure between the planes makes me want to puke. I rip my hoodie off and drop it. It gets sucked away in the hot, solar wind. My shirt flips up, smoldering air heavy against my sweat-slick skin. 

I’m not afraid.

The gun and sword heat up, sweaty and loose in my grip.

Annie’s got her fists by her face, ice spreading from her knuckles to her wrists and down further, the shining white almost vulgar against the alien landscape. She glances at me, then behind me.

Sasha and Connie stumble through next, and Sasha actually does vomit. Connie holds her crossbow and her bangs, looking a little green himself. I turn back to Annie, who’s scanning the barren landscape, covering for us while we adjust to the environment. The dizziness fades quickly.

It doesn’t take long for someone to notice us. I level the gun at the first titan I see, my finger finally resting on the trigger. The bullet lands between its eyes with a squelch, and to my horror, it does nothing to the charging behemoth. I fire again, aiming for its shining eyes. The worst I do is put a hitch in its step. Annie kicks high over her head, though, her shin encased in crystal. The impact of her foot against the titan’s jaw snaps it straight off in a splattering of hot tar that rains over her.

She spins and sweeps her leg against its ankles, shoving its shoulder against her momentum and knocking it straight on its face. 

I’m distracted. I look around, trying to focus, searching for new targets.

There’s more of them creeping over the hills. Annie runs at them and engages three of them at once. They’re something like twice her size.

Sasha and Connie are running behind me, covering each other, and another goopy titan escapes Annie’s barrage to bolt straight for me.

They’re not cracking or drying out here. Every hit Annie lands on them, tar flies from the impact, their fire contained under a layer of glop.

I’m firing bullets into the titan’s eyes. It does nothing to slow it, just like before. Dumb, wasting time and ammo. 

“Fuck,” I spit, stuffing the gun back into my pants and tossing the sword to my right hand. It’s still coming, blindly charging me, its slitted eyes full of white-hot metal. I guess I did something, then. Good.

I roll away from it, kicking up bright red dust, and come up behind it, my stiff limbs screaming from the effort. I jump at it and swing the sword in a wide sweep across the back of its neck.

I’d been aiming to decapitate it, but it goes down with my swing regardless. It felt exactly like I might expect, like molasses against my blade. Thick and sticky. Hard to cut through. The titan melts over the earth. I hop back on one foot, shaking mire off the sword and my foot, dodging the puddle forming. It’s not like before. No ashes here, just heat and melting. I think the soles of my shoes might be melting.

Spinning, I find another two titans bumbling behind me, crossbow bolts sticking out of their eye sockets. I swing up at one, the blade sinking into the side of its neck. Like butchering a cow with a baseball bat. Next to me, Connie gores his broken, sharp blade through the other’s neck. His goes down, mine reaches out to me, and Connie’s fast to sever its reaching, dripping arm.

It’s so hot. Flames arc out instead of gore like little explosions of heat, threatening to singe my skin.

I yank my blade out, then reel back again and hack, the blade sinking halfway through its neck, and it starts to drip and melt, losing its form. Two down.

“Jean!”

I whip my head toward Annie, who’s _coated_ in burning black tar. Frozen white lines trail down her cheeks from her eyes. She points a frozen finger at a beam of darkness that curves down from the too-close sun and lights the ground on fire.

“She’s there!”

Connie, behind me, yanks Sasha’s bolts out of the puddles. She’s running up to us then, leaving a fucking pile of gelatinous dead titans behind her, and grabs the bolts gratefully. “Go,” she spits, loading her crossbow and spinning to plug another monster as it bubbles up behind her.

“Sash—”

“ _Go!_ ” She and Connie yell in unison this time, Connie flicking tar off his blade, and I don’t question them. I turn and sprint toward where the flame had landed, not even engaging the titans around me. They’re more interested in Annie anyway, who’s tailing me fast, her frozen steps heavy and crunchy against the hot ground. She’s taking them out. I can hear the wet packing sound of Annie beating the brains out of the damn things, the squeals of the titans as they fall. I look over my shoulder at her.

She’s riding one’s shoulders, wrist-deep in its neck, and it’s frozen under her as if paralyzed. She pulls back, ice miraculously undisturbed on her skin, and she yanks out a wriggling, white-hot cord. Something approaching a nervous system. The titan she’s riding shrieks as it melts, and she dismounts smoothly, tossing the spinal cord aside and sprinting to catch up with me.

The hot air is heavy in my throat. I run, gasping for breath, sweat dripping down my face and stinging the cuts and burns there, my hands sticky with blackness. They’re strong here, much stronger than they’d been at Pixis’s, hard to kill. I spin around them, dodging their blows, occasionally catching an unlucky punch in the shoulder or glancing by my hip. Not worth fighting.

I can see Marco kneeling on the hot earth, eyes cast to the ground, back slumped, and panic surges through me. I move faster toward him, screaming his name, my voice lost in the roaring winds, and the wall hits me before I have a chance to see it. The blade falls from my hand. I forget about it. I reach out and my hands find the boundary, and it feels sharp and hot under my fingers. It doesn’t give under my fingers, no matter how hard I push against it. Something comes out from the cloud in my mind, from so long ago.

_\--usually things that are being kept from their rightful owners—_

I wonder if I’m dead.

The longer and harder I shove, the hotter the wall becomes, until the burning is too much and I yank my hands away. 

Marco’s right there, right _there_ , maddeningly close and unresponsive to my shouts. Melinoë uncurls herself from Marco’s side. Her form is hazy, like smoke, but I can make out her cruel, bloody smile as she wraps around the priest. Her slender, blackened fingers curl under his chin, pulling his gaze to her, lips twisting poisonous words into his ears. Her white fist pulls behind her, wrist yanked by some unseen force, and her body twists with it, but the darkness surrounding them is too strong. Whatever’s pulling on her, whatever goodness is left in her deathly thin form, it’s overpowered. Helpless. 

Her lips move, strained by her malice, and tears pour down Marco’s cheeks as he gives a small nod.

I scream. My heart is pounding, hammering against my ribs, and I haul back and punch the boundary with all of the adrenaline-fueled fury I can muster. The boundary stabs back, its sharp walls cutting my knuckles to the bone. The pain knocks me onto my back.

My thoughts are whirling. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and scream, cursing the sky, shouting Marco’s name. My eyes are wet under my palms. I scream until my throat is raw, heels digging and kicking into the soft earth, until the last of my energy leaves me and my body sags.

Staring up at the fiery, swirling sky, I watch a flare of heat and lightning crash across the sky. The wind is howling and dirty. My mind is chaos.

I think about Marco. I think about the boundary separating us. I think about the black abyss opening under his knees.

I think about my love for him.

I think about possessing him, taking him from his church like a statue or a trinket. Foolish. I never owned Marco, I never had him wrapped around my finger. I was just holding on while I could, grasping at straws around him. Then I let him fall out of my grasp like water.

I know I’m going to die here. It’s inevitable. All of the molecules in the universe have flown out from the first big explosion and aligned for this infinitely microscopic moment, and in this hovering instant, the stardust allotted to my being is seeping through my hands like sand out of a broken hourglass.

I haul myself to my feet, understanding, and regain control.

When I approach the boundary this time, I press my hands to it again, and it is cold as ice. I lean my forehead against it. As I press my hands forward, my fingers sink into it and freeze.

It gives under my touch, the frozen air welcoming, and when I emerge on the other side my skin is pale from the cold. 

Melinoë whips her head around to look at me, and she gives an enraged growl. 

The strange dreams flood my mind again, and as she appears an inch in front of me, the smell of burning tar washes over me. I close my eyes. Her black hand, claws sharp and wicked, lunges toward my heart, but she passes through me as if I were nothing. I open my eyes again, her shocked, dual-toned face twisting back into malice. I grab the greasy black hair at the base of her skull and yank, exposing her neck. My bloody fingers pull the gun back out of my pants.

It takes no effort to hit the safety and blow her blackened brains out through the top of her skull. I aimed for where I guess her brain stem is. Her eyes widen, cross, then roll back, and I toss her disgusting corpse to the ground.

It’ll hold her off for now.

Marco is still kneeling, and as I approach the rift under him, I look down and see the infinite spread of stars under his knees.

I stand at the ragged edge of the dark universe, ten feet and a million miles away from Marco.

Exhaling slowly, I step forward. The sky ripples like water under my feet as I take slow, sure steps toward the priest.

Melinoë is coughing, alive again, ripping holes in the boundary, and titans pour in through them, their skin cracking through the frozen boundary, spitting sparks and burning in the gusting wind that follows them in.

When they run at me, they fall into the universe, and I watch disinterestedly as their bodies twist and crumple into nothingness as they drop through space.

I finally come to a stop in front of Marco. He looks up at me, eyes glazed and unfocused. His hands rest limp in his lap, the right broken and bruised, but his eyes are back to normal. Almost. The right is still ringed with a thin band of blood.

I call his name. The sound echoes distant and spirals into the rift, but it is not lost on him. His eyes clear a little, focusing on me. I extend my hands to him.

He slides his fingers into mine, weak and shaking, and I pull him gently to me, wrapping him in my arms. 

I can hear Melinoë and her wrath fading away as together we fall into the stars.


	10. I Pray To You My Soul To Keep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whatever it takes to get you away from this, Marco.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)

I’m ten years old again. I’m climbing the tree. As my shoes skid on the bark, too smooth to catch a good hold, I pull my tiny body higher and higher. My heart is hammering in my chest. I’m so afraid, up so high, unwilling to go higher but left with no choice. I have to keep climbing. I have to go higher.

I’m frantic, but I wonder: if I get to the top, will I be able to see God?

I lean up on my toes and reach shakily for the next branch, and that’s when it happens.

My foot slips.

I’m falling. 

As I fall I have time to wonder who will tell my teacher that I couldn’t finish my homework. Who will tell my parents that I love them.

The crack of my head against the branch is loud and wet, and then everything is black.

I’m watching the EMTs shake their heads as they load my body into the ambulance. “I’m here,” I scream, my voice cracking desperately. I wave my hands, but even I can’t see them.

My parents are crying when they identify my body. My mother falls to her knees with a sob, screaming in French as she claws at the floor. My father, tears streaking his normally stern face, doesn’t have the strength to pull her to her feet. She collapses fully against the floor, slamming her hand against the tile, and when I beg her to stop before she hurts herself, my voice comes out shaky and deep from the doctor pulling the sheet back over my face.

Her screams echo through the hallways. It takes a long time before they stop, before someone gives her a sedative and checks her in. My father is shell-shocked. He stares up at the ceiling, whispering prayers under his breath, tears staining the collar of his shirt.

My mother forsakes God. My father searches for Him. I am invisible in her room, watching them so far away from each other, each hollow deep in their despair.

No matter how much I cry and scream and tell them I love them, they can’t hear me.

I wander the hallways for hours. I try to get people to notice me, try to knock things over to get their attention, but my hands don’t exist anymore except ten floors below me in the morgue.

The feeling hits me first when I’m sobbing under a nurse’s desk, curled in tight on myself. The feeling that lights me on fire, makes my tiny heart pound, my non-existent skin crawl and sweat. I need to run. I need to leave. Go, go go go. _Go!_

I do.

I sprint down the hallways, a darkness chasing me, shadows curling along the twisting walls. The hospital is a nightmare, the paint chipping off the walls, the floor cracking and falling away into nothingness. I run faster.

When a hand wraps firmly around my bicep, I scream, high and long, trying to struggle away, but young, pale hands hold me tight. My feet slip out from under me. I fall hard on my knees, staring deep into the darkness peeking out between the shattering tiles.

“Get away!” The voice comes from my left, shrill and tinier than mine. I chance a look behind me.

The girl holding me is smaller than me, her long blonde hair braided neatly over her shoulders. One hand holds me somehow, while the other is braced out against the coming darkness. Tendrils of shadow curl out around the impossibly black center of the thing, and I swear when I look into the painfully dark locus I can see shining red teeth. I whimper.

“Get away, Melinoë,” the girl says, her voice wavering but finishing firm. I’m gasping for air, feet scrabbling at the broken tiles, and the monster laughs, deep and reverberating. “You can’t have him. Go back!”

“Can you fight me?” The voice cracks all around us, hollow and distant but _so frightening_. The thing curls and twists into itself, contracting and expanding and pushing against her tiny white palm. “You’re so tiny now. This form is pathetic.” 

“Ymir will send you back,” she replies, her voice strong now. She hauls me to my feet with a strength unbecoming of a child so small. “Ymir will make you go away. So you’d better leave now!”

The thing laughs louder, pulsing. We’re pushed back, and I trip over a small crack that leads deep into the abyss. I get my feet under me again, careful not to get stuck there. I look at the girl, her braids blown back over her shoulders, so little against this massive evil. 

“I’ll come back for him,” the thing warns, before it spirals into itself and melts onto the floor in a great puddle of black paint. It seeps over the tiles and through the holes, and when it’s gone the hallway repairs itself.

When I blink, everything is back to normal, and no one passing by looks at either of us. The world just fell to pieces around them, and no one noticed.

The girl sighs and looks up at me with a shaky smile.

“Are you ready to go home, Jean?”

“Wh-who are you? Why can you see me?”

She tilts her head and her smile widens into something bright and beautiful. “I’m different too. Come on.” She moves her grip to my hand, and doesn’t let go as she leads me onto an elevator. “I’m Christa, by the way. I’m ten years old, just like you, so we can be friends.”

“What happened to me?” I stare down at her, dazzled by how huge her pretty green eyes are. 

“Nothing that I can’t fix,” she replies, and I smile weakly at her. Gotta be brave. My knobby, awkward knees are knocking together, my body still quaking. She returns the smile and my heart thuds a little harder. 

We come to the basement again, and I’m scared once more. I don’t want to see myself again, my forehead caved in a little from where the tree hit me. She senses my hesitance and leads me off the elevator, squeezing my hand reassuringly. 

She only lets me go to open the big metal door holding my body. Tears fill my eyes. I stare at the floor, shaking.

“Close your eyes, Jean,” she says quietly as she reaches up onto her toes to pull my bed out. I can’t bring myself to help her, even if she is a girl. I don’t have a body to help with, anyway. I close my eyes tightly.

Her warm hands come to rest on my cheeks. I suck in a sharp breath, but keep my eyes closed. 

“I’ll see you again someday, okay?”

“Christa—”

She lifts me like I weigh nothing, and the world goes black again.

\--

I know where I am now, but it looks different. The tile under my feet isn’t as dull, it isn’t cold, and the fog hasn’t seeped in.

It is dark, though, and that one hazy streetlight is still the only bare light in this small bathroom.

I blink, looking around, and despite the numbness filling my being I feel dread settling heavy in my chest.

I turn to face the bathtub, already knowing what I’m going to find.

Neither of them notice me. I’m just a spectator.

He’s curled up in the bathtub, hands digging and pulling desperately at his hair, his dangerously thin body wracked with sobs. He’s crying, crying so hard, pulling and begging and whimpering, and she hovers mercilessly above him.

Melinoë.

She’s centered her form more. Instead of tendrils, she has a thin, wiry body, but her hair expands dark around them and devours all the light it can. She hangs down from the ceiling, her hands reaching down to him, her mismatched eyes wide and her grin fucking huge above them. Tar drips from her fingertips and into his hair. 

He shrinks down into the bathtub, crying out, “Please stop, _please_ —”

“Marco,” she hisses, reaching further for him, just barely missing him. “Marco, come here.”

“No, no—”

“If you don’t come, they’ll hurt you. I’ll make them hurt you. Come here.”

I open my mouth to yell, I move my hands to my gun, but neither of these things happen. I’m a ghost in this scene. Helpless and meaningless and now I have to _watch_. I crouch down and whimper, my hands coming to cover my mouth.

The sound of Marco’s heaving sobs is loud. I can’t see his face. He’s curled in on himself, his shoulder blades sticking up so sharp.

She whispers then, and the venomous sound of her disgusting manipulation echoes on a different plane. Her words twist out of her mouth, down to him, wrapping around him so dark and cold, her black smoke filling the bathtub around him. He tenses, listening to her against his will, and then he’s screaming.

He scrabbles to get away, his eyes wild and so _terrified_. The scratches down his face can only be his. He’s struggling, kicking, trying to get away from her, out of the bathtub, but the smoke grabs him and holds him back. She laughs, and he begs, and the tendrils pull him under.

I scramble closer to the scene. The floor grows longer. No matter how hard I run, no matter how much I scream, I can’t get closer, and I’m crying too by the time I collapse helpless on the floor. I can’t watch.

But I have to.

I look up at his hands flailing in the air, clawing at the sides of the tub, his legs kicking desperately like he’s drowning. She lets him up, and he takes a deep gasping breath, immediately using it to scream, “ _Please!_ ”

“Come here,” she sighs, lengthening and dripping toward him from the ceiling. She looks straight into his face, her grin widening above her narrowing eyes. “Do you want it to stop?”

He stares at her, gasping, chest heaving, before he nods.

I shout his name, trying again to reach him, but he can’t hear me. Useless.

Her hands reach out to his face, and she runs sharp fingers from his jaw to his eyes. He shudders. She grabs the huge, lumpy metal coins that fall onto his eyes from her effervescent palms and shoves them into his mouth. He chokes and coughs, kicking again, his fingers squeaking along plastic.

“Marco, Marco,” she whispers, and I’m already trying to throw shit at her, but I don’t have hands. I’m screaming soundlessly. My throat aches. Please, please, Marco—

When she holds out a box cutter, his eyes widen, his teeth gritting on the old coins. He looks from her to the razor and back, then gives a muffled sob and closes his eyes. 

He gives in.

I watch his body sag under the weight of his decision, even as his trembling fingers reach for the box cutter. I’m shaking. I’m shaking and screaming and begging, and her grin is growing wider and wider, and by the time the last of his breaths slowly, stutteringly leaves his body, I’m sprawled on my back on the floor of this evil place and sobbing desperately at the ceiling. I’ve never felt pain like this. No amount of tears I shed can bring him back to me. All I can do is cry, cry, cry, useless and hopeless on this ugly old bathmat while Melinoë reaches into his chest and pulls him out.

The rest is a blur. The EMTs shake their heads and cover his body. Melinoë hangs from the ceiling above him, unseen, rooting around and pulling out all the little spindles of his soul.

She’s displeased by what she finds, though. With a growl, she pushes him back inside his corpse with a series of whispers, tucking pieces of herself into his body all around his sweet, still heart.

The EMT standing in my left knee stiffens, then turns to his partner. “We should take him to state.”

“Why? He’s just DOA, turf him to the morgue.”

“Nah, I’m thinking some foul play. Get him to the guys at state, they can take a look and start a case.”

“Carter—”

“Let’s just get him out of Jinae,” the EMT says, and under his voice is the broken, rotten breath that issues from Melinoë’s lips over Marco’s corpse. The other guys stiffens as well, then nods. 

I close my eyes. They burn from the effort of my tears. 

It’s dark then. Dark again. Whispers echo out of the darkness, doctors and nurses and the low, grating rumble of an old man.

An image flashes in my mind. Wrinkled old hands holding a simple wooden cross on a length of leather toward a thin chest, trembling under a suit that’s too loose for his emaciated form.

“Say goodbye, Marco,” the old man says, and a familiar sniffle echoes up from the darkness. “Say goodbye and come with me.”

“… Goodbye,” comes Marco’s shaking voice, so tiny and hopeless and hollow inside.

\--

It’s raining. Hard.

My skin is wet, my eyes closed against the downpour. It’s so cold. My feet slide on the hard surface under me. I’m on a slant.

My chest hurts.

My chest and my throat and my head and my heart, and before I even think to open my eyes I’m falling backward and sitting heavily. I barely feel the impact. I bury my wet face in my hands and sob brokenly, allowing myself this before I pull my knees to my chest and cry into my soaked jeans instead. 

Marco's screams echo in my ears, still too fresh, too sharp, covering everything in me and sinking deep.

I cry for a long time, curled in on myself and feeling again like that tiny child hidden under a desk in a broken hospital. The rain pours around me, not bothering to console me as I drown in my misery.

When I finally gather the sense to look up again, I notice where I am, and if I had room for anything besides despair I suppose I’d be afraid.

The walls around Old Trost are filling with water. Waves slosh against the houses, lapping over the edges of the slanted red roofs, black and filled with splintered wood. It’s a pool two stories deep now, and the water level is rising. I stand and scoot back toward the apex of the roof, my feet slipping on the red clay tiles. 

The sky is nearly black, clouds swirling, lightning cutting sharp across the sky.

She speaks before I notice her, and the suddenness of her soft voice makes me jolt. 

“You spend a lot of time being dead, Jean.”

I whirl toward her, almost falling off this damn roof as I do, and my eyes come to rest on the tiny blonde standing at the edge of the narrow apex. She looks over the ruined city, her back to me, her dress fluttering and flapping in the wet wind. 

My eyes narrow. “Christa?”

She nods. Her hair slides wetly over her shoulder before she turns to me. She basically hasn’t aged a day, still young and beautiful, but I know she must still be my age. If she follows human rules, that is. She’s much shorter than me now, and there are small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a weary weight to her smile.

I let the defensive stance drop and walk toward her, my steps careful. She waits for me. 

“Where are we?”

“The place you go to,” she replies cryptically, her hands coming to lace in front of her. A small leather satchel sticks to her wet dress, hanging by a thin strap over her tiny chest. 

“What are you?”

“Someone who sees.”

I run an irate hand through my hair, slicking my shaggy bangs back against my head. The rain lets up just a little, but not without a deafening crash of thunder. 

“Sorry,” she says, and she smiles kindly at me with a small tilt of her head. “You’ve grown up so big, Jean. I wish you had more hope.”

“It doesn’t come from many places. What’s been happening? What is this?”

She looks up at the sky and blinks slowly. “This is what happens when you die. You come to this place, the place that haunts you the most.”

I swallow nervously and choose to ignore that last part. “No, I mean all the shit before this.”

She plays with her fingers a little and looks back up at me. “Just things that you had trouble remembering.”

“I could have done without the second part.”

“Oh, that was Marco. He’s died too, I guess.”

The casual way she lays that on me hits me like a fucking bullet to the chest. I lean over the impact, my mouth dropping open, and I can already feel numbness ascending from my fingers. I stumble toward her, unable to distinguish between rain and tears, and when I collapse onto my knees in front of her all I can do is bury my face in my hands and whimper.

I sit heavily on my heels, gasping for air, panic lighting my brain on fire. My heart is hammering so hard it hurts and I just want it to _stop_. Stop, heart, stop beating. My fingers are cold against my face, but I find no comfort in that.

When she steps toward me, I lurch into her, burying my face in her and wrapping my arms around her thighs. I grasp her dress and cry some more. It’s all I can do. It’s all I’m good for. I wail into her and shake and she runs her fingers through my hair with a soft hum, admirably strong against the way I’m pulling desperately. 

She lets me scream and cry and curse myself and the gods and everything else until I’m exhausted and my entire body aches with the weight of my mourning.

“Are you ready to go home, Jean?”

I stare up at her, then shake my head violently. I pull back enough to rasp, “Home is gone. Send me away.” Home is gone.

She shakes her head and smiles that damned patient smile again, then reaches down to slide her warm fingers along my cheeks. “He’s waiting for you. What makes you think he isn’t coming home too?”

I can’t even think of a response for that. I bite my lip and more tears come then, even though I could swear I’ve lost all the water in my body by now. When she asks me again, I give her a tiny nod, and she rubs her thumbs against my cheeks. 

“Close your eyes, Jean.”

I trust her. I close my eyes, and she lifts me again like I weigh nothing at all.

\--

I blink slowly, trying to focus my eyes on Christa’s face. Her blurry expression sharpens, and when she sees that I’m here, she stands and moves away from me. 

The sky above me is a planet, huge and far too close. Something dark wraps around it, squeezing it, barren and groaning. A glacier stabbing upward from the black earth is melting and dripping toward whatever I’m lying on. I curl my fingers into fists and give a shuddering sigh. The ground is cold and soft beneath me.

A heaving gasp comes from my side. I recognize it immediately. I’m on my knees then, scrambling toward Marco, and he arches his back and gives a strained whimper. Christa’s attempts to hush him go unnoticed, probably because he’s just now having to come to terms with the fact that his leg and hand are wrecked. She pushes his sweaty bangs off his face and murmurs quietly, but he just whines and digs his nails into the shining dirt under us.

“What’s happening?” I look up at her, frantic, my hands hovering uselessly by his side. 

“Melinoë’s possession is harsh,” she replies, looking behind herself, then back to Marco. “He’s dying again.”

“Can’t we do something?”

She shakes her head and pulls the leather satchel out of the folds of her dress. She drags one finger through the dust beside him, drawing a circle. With a small prayer, she shakes out the contents of her satchel, wide eyes closely watching the way small animal bones and wooden trinkets fall onto the earth. Her fingers hover over a tiny skull, a mouse or a rat, but she moves to grasp a little star of frail, strapped-together bones instead. She pushes Marco’s hair aside again and rests it on his forehead, and the presence of the thing seems to calm him slightly. He’s still giving out pained whimpers, but at least he’s stopped gasping and arching.

I run my hands through my hair and exhale slowly. His eyes are shut tight. I feel so helpless.

Christa stands and moves away. I look around us.

We’re on some strange pale island, floating in a sea of stars. The blue planet above us sloughs off a deep fog onto the wavy dirt, but it rolls off into the universe. Over the edge below us, I can see a great fire, and the heat waves radiating upward battle with the chill from above for dominance of the air. 

All the light in the world is coming from that sun, but even so, it struggles to illuminate a vast blackness stretching across space in the direction Christa went. No starlight penetrates that black hole. Looking into the wriggling darkness, I suddenly feel like I might pitch forward and fall forever into the jaws of the underworld. 

She stands there, back to me, arms outstretched. The void shudders. Her long hair falls toward it. I feel like I’m falling, so I squeeze my eyes shut and fist my hands in Marco’s shirt, grounding myself.

I take a few deep breaths and stare upwards again. The planet groans, deep and pained. The things wrapped around its surface are squeezing it, gripping it tightly, as if trying to yank the planet out of its orbit and into the unknown below. The glacier drips into a small, circular pool in the middle of the island. It shimmers and small waves lap up onto the ground. I can’t see into it from this angle, but I’m too reluctant to leave Marco to even try. 

There’s a shaking, and a loud thud, but I’m not brave enough to turn my head toward the writhing beast again. Let Christa commune with it. I’ll stay right here. I’ll stay at home. I look down at Marco and brush a stray tangle off of his pale brow, my fingers sliding in the sweat. I’d almost swear he leans into the touch.

He frowns, though. I know what he means. I have to be brave.

“Okay,” I sigh as I stand on unsteady knees. I repeat the word a few times, then stand straight. I have to take a few good, deep breaths before I can turn toward Christa. Before I can look into the abyss.

Something is slumped across the edge of the island. I squint at it, then at Christa, who is somehow resisting the change in gravity. I swallow. Her dress flutters toward the mass now below us. I feel my body starting to obey her rules. Blood rushes to my face, to my stomach, and my skin crawls. I’m standing on a wall, only anchored to the surface by the feeling of my feet on it. I don’t dare move for fear that I’ll be overcome.

I clench my fists and stare into the abyss. Challenging it. And it looks back into me, fucking Nietzsche-esque, and I am not afraid.

The thing, I realize, is not some unholy tentacle. It’s a root. Just a really, absurdly large tree root. A person, a human stalks up the root, emerging from the blackness. They’re reaching out to grab Christa’s hand. They smile at her and pull her close, curling around her, keeping her safe. Their boots grip the edge of the root, fighting the downward pull. 

They lift Christa and jump down onto the island, and immediately the root recoils into the dark.

Gravity shifts. My head spins as my feet are back under me, as the world moves back under me. I almost pitch over, but I just close my eyes and take a deep, rattling breath. When I open my eyes again, Christa is dragging the tall brunette back toward us, mumbling to her in shallow breaths.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the array of bones and wood in the circle next to Marco. I turn to them, standing protective over the priest. My pulse speeds up watching this person, this brunette, lean over and examine the bones. There’s silence for a while, but for the gentle dripping of the glacier's runoff and the roaring fires below us.

The brunette is tall, thin, muscular. Her hands rest in her pockets as her dark, keen eyes examine the dust. Freckles cross her face, just like Marco’s, and I swear they shimmer like stars. They’re nothing on his. A constellation spread across their faces, deep and beautiful, almost perfect mirror images. 

“I hate to say it, Kirschtein,” she says finally, leaning up to stare at me. “But you really fucked this one up.”

I grit my teeth and glare at her, but I know she’s right, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can do is show her that I’m ready to make it right again.

“Ymir,” Christa scolds softly, looking up at the woman. “Don’t. He’s only playing his part.” The name rings familiar in my mind, Hanji's voice rising from distant memories.

She, Ymir, scratches her head and sighs. “Can’t fight that.”

Christa sighs and wrings her hands. She looks up at me, so small between us. “He needs to go to a hospital. I can’t save him. Three times… three times is too many, let alone risking a fourth. His body can’t take it.”

I run my sweaty hands through my hair, closing my eyes tightly. I fight the panic. I fight it for him. Guilt makes me stupid. Focus. I exhale slowly, then look at her again. “What are we gonna do?”

Ymir bites her thumbnail, staring down at the bones, before murmuring, “We’re running out of time.”

“We have to finish this,” Christa says. She looks so afraid, so different from the bright little girl that saved my ass in the hospital. “Melinoë isn’t going to wait for us, and she’s already started her plans.”

I look between them. I don’t understand. They sense this, and exchange a glance. I change my question. “What do I need to do?”

“You can’t pull the same shit you did down there before,” Ymir says, turning to me. 

“I don’t even know what I did.”

Christa sighs and twists her long hair over her shoulder. It shimmers in the light from the sun below us. “When I put you back the first time, I… I didn’t do it right. I was still young, so I hadn’t remembered everything. You were incomplete.” She pauses, eyes cast to the ground. “Ymir caught on just in time, breaking her barrier.”

“Wait, what? I thought—”

“You thought what, lover-boy?” Ymir sneers at me. I hate this asshole already. “You thought true love prevailed? No, I helped you out.”

My eye twitches. “So what, you made me invincible too?”

Christa shakes her head. I flick my gaze back to her. “That was you.”

“What’d I do?” I stuff my hands in my pockets, brow furrowed. 

“Like I said, you were incomplete. So when you…” She pauses, looking from me to Marco, a frown passing over her soft face. I don’t know what I did to make her sad, but I already want to apologize. “When you gave up—” Oh. Dammit. “—you changed. You shifted planes. She came after you, intent on killing a human, her strike passed right through a ghost. It seems like she still can’t control her powers well.”

“So, is that something I can do now?” I try not to sound excited.

Ymir barks out a laugh, but Christa sticks her lower lip out at her, and the brunette falls silent again. 

“No. This time you’re complete.”

Before I can reply, the ground shakes under us, a huge thunderous _whumph_ from under the earth. I crouch quickly, reaching for my knife, but nothing’s there. Of course. Shit. I just reach down and grab Marco’s sleeve. 

“Chill out,” Ymir sighs, closing her eyes lazily. “It’s just the cavalry.”

“What?” I look up at her, but relax slightly. I don’t let go of him. “The fuck are you talking about?”

Ymir smirks and walks to the nearby edge, leaning over and staring toward the furnace below. She reaches down and grabs the hand that pokes up over the edge, bracing herself and hauling. And up comes fucking Reiner Braun.

I stare, jaw slack. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I move to just kneel on the soft earth, staring at the edge where Reiner’s orienting himself, looking dizzy and worse for the wear. He brushes me off, though, and turns to reach back over the edge.

He pulls up again, and he drags a very unconscious Connie over the edge and drops him to the side. My brow furrows, but his face is slightly twisted in a pained expression, so he’s probably not dead. Reiner pulls Sasha up next, holding onto her hips until she can stand on her own. The first thing she does is wobble over to Connie and collapse against him, though, and the sounds of her soft sobs echo muffled through the air. I get this sinking feeling in my gut.

The next person over the edge is Annie, who adjusts gracefully. She looks like shit, though, and she’s still covered in black ooze. She moves to sit by the edge of the pool, looking rather unwilling to speak to anyone. I’m wondering what the fuck happened down there.

I can’t really say I’m surprised when Reiner hauls a shaking, sweaty Bertholdt up next. Those three are a combo pack. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me when I ran into Annie first. Bert moves to collapse next to Connie and Sasha, offering them quiet, weird comfort. Sasha just shakes.

Reiner comes over and plops onto the ground next to Marco, beside the bones. He looks about as charming as I’m sure the rest of us do, blackened and exhausted, his scrubs burned at the sleeves. I stare at him, and he just shakes his head.

“So you’re one too? A titan?”

He looks over at me with an expression that screams, ‘What the fuck do you think?’ so I drop it. I look back down at Marco. He’s so clammy, so sweaty. He needs to get out of here. I shudder and look back up at Reiner. “What happened down there?”

He shakes his head and scratches his dirty nails through his short blonde hair. “It’s bad, man.” He looks up at Ymir then. “It’s not like back then. This isn’t something Melinoë just decided to do. She’s been working on this since the Greeks got Rested, bet you ten bucks.”

“How did she get out of that? What’s the deal with this bitch, anyway?” I sit back on my heels as I ask, moving to wrap my fingers around Marco’s. He’s so clammy.

Christa sits down too, her skirts spreading primly around her. Reiner gives her a tired smile, which she returns. “She stole something from Hades, right before the Resting was supposed to begin. Whatever it is, it took his necromancy, so she has it now. That’s how she’s manipulating spirits. As for how she’s here… as the Resting moved through the underworld, she hid in Styx and waited.”

“I didn’t think it was that easy.”

“No one did,” Christa replies grimly. She looks down at her bones once more before carefully gathering them and putting them back in her satchel. 

“Why is she doing this?”

Christa shakes her head again, looking up at Ymir. The titan sighs, rubbing the back of her neck, and genuine pain spreads across her face. I almost feel bad. “Ilse told me about it, before those fucks stormed her keep. You guys have a break in your town, right?” I blink. She huffs. “Something that spits out low-grade shit?”

“The fault?” I wrinkle my nose. It hurts. My whole head hurts. This is too much.

“Yeah, whatever. Melinoë’s trying to line up the rift and the fault. She was doing pretty good, too, until you messed it up. So good job, or whatever.” I snort. She ignores me, turning to stare up at the blue planet above us. “She’s trying to line them up, because if she does, she lets out everything in all the hells. From every mythology. And they’re gonna pour onto Midgard all at once, and then she’ll suddenly be the reigning queen of her own little world.”

I feel a chill settle into my gut. I don’t even want to think about the logistics of that. “Where’s Ilse now?”

“Dead.” Ymir sniffs, trying to play it cool, but she tilts her head back farther to hide her face. I don’t push it.

Reiner runs his hands down his face and sighs. “You did a number on her, Jean,” he says into his palms before he looks at me again. “She’s weak for now, but we have to move fast. She’s not gonna stay that way.” He pauses, glancing down at Marco for a moment. “She’s gonna come for him.”

“What do we do?” I look between them, and none of them look particularly motivated. I close my eyes then and lean forward, forward until my forehead hits Marco’s chest. Home again.

I turn my head to listen to his heartbeat. It’s weak and fluttery, too fast, but it’s there. That’s a start. Even with weak whimpers occasionally echoing up between his ribs, it’s still something. I’ll take what I can get at this point, because I’m not exactly convinced I’m ever gonna get it again.

No one disturbs me for a while. I lay here, breathing the sparse air, allowing myself to be calmed by his frail heartbeat. I’m tired. I just want to sleep. I want all of this to pass me over, to leave me behind. Let me stay here forever. I’m so tired.

Minutes pass before Reiner speaks again. “She has to go. But none of us are powerful enough to Rest her, not even Ymir.”

Ymir scoffs, digging the toe of her boot into the sand, but doesn’t say anything.

“Jean’s complete now, but even if he wasn’t, I don’t think we could pull the same trick twice.” Christa taps her chin, thinking. “Melinoë doesn’t know how to use Hades’s power with her own. That doesn’t mean she isn’t learning. She’s smart. We need a way to bring her here, but not with an army of titans.”

“I’ll go grab her,” Ymir says, cracking her knuckles. “Grab her, bring her back here, then we’ll figure something out.”

I have a feeling it’s not gonna be that easy, no matter how lax the titan sounds. I open my eyes and look up at Marco. The bones resting on his brow slide a little in his sweat. 

I wish he was awake. I want to hear his confusion as he tries to juggle all of this. I want to hear him try to soothe me, digging around for the silver lining. Tears fills my eyes and he swims a little in my vision. I turn to bury my face in his chest. No one questions me.

I hear Reiner stand. “We have to go get her,” he says, exhaustion starting to seep into his voice. He walks away then, probably to Bert and the others. 

“I can help,” I manage after a while, pulling heavily away from Marco and standing on shaky legs. I’m aching all over, I notice, but I’m too fucking stubborn to let that stop me. I started all this shit, I have to finish it. “Whatever we’re doing, let me in on it.”

Ymir grins and lightly punches me in the shoulder, about the only part of me that isn’t aching and broken.

I hear Sasha let out a broken wail then, and I jolt at the sound, looking quickly at them. She’s holding a flailing Connie deep in her chest, and sobbing loudly into the stars. I guess he just woke up. Bert and Reiner take a step back, Bert looking his trademark sweaty and nervous. Reiner runs his knuckles up the mortician’s bare forearm soothingly.

Turning back to Christa, I cross my arms tightly over my chest. The movement makes my busted rib twinge harshly. “She needs Marco, right? To open it all the way?”

“I really hope so,” Christa says quietly, a heavy weight to her voice. She looks up at me, paler than usual. “I really, really hope so.”

\--

We come up with a plan. It’s a horrible plan, but it’s the only thing we have, and we’re running out of time.

Uninformed, unprepared, and distinctly unhopeful, we stand on the other side of Ymir’s flat, disc-shaped island planet, looking up at Muspelheim. The sand on this side is scorched and packed-down from the burning fires above, burning embers smoking amidst the grains. There’s a pool on this side too, but it’s boiling viciously, pouring out a sick green vapor.

Connie and Sasha stand close together, Connie with his broken sword and Sasha with her crossbow. Annie puts on her ice knuckles again. Reiner’s ice covers his body, turning him into a gigantic, golem-like beast. Bertholdt squeezes his eyes shut, wringing his hands, and projects a huge, shadowy figure above himself. He falls into the shade and disappears in its darkness. I stare up at him, monstrous and effervescent, and realize where I’ve seen this before. I dimly recognize it from Jinae’s barren, broken factory. I don’t have it in me to be surprised. I’m just overstimulated and exhausted and in pain, and more than ready for this whore to cease existing already.

Ymir flexes her fingers and sighs. “First time I’ve done this in a while,” she mumbles, just as her nails grow out sharp and her teeth project into fangs out of her head. Her mouth widens, her jaws strengthening and jutting into a vicious underbite. She crouches, bones popping and rearranging until she’s a veritable monster, ready to kill some shit. 

Then there’s me. Weaponless, half-functional, shaking for a cigarette, a beer, and a goddamn vacation.

Christa is on the other side with Marco, a last line of defense. I’m not sure what good she’ll do, but if her encounter with Melinoë in the hospital is any indication, she should at least be able to hold her off long enough to save him from her grasp. Long enough to take him out of the equation.

My chest tightens at the thought. I feel like I'm sinking.

I stare up into the fire and dimly notice a conglomeration of blackness forming above us. Fucking awesome. Titans, titans everywhere. They’re moving like ants, crowding together. The wind and fire are hot, even from up here, and I’m definitely dreading having to face that shit again.

“Okay,” Ymir manages, her voice thick and muffled by her jacked-up teeth. Not that I’d say that to her face. Not right now. “Jean, just try not to die. They’ll try to clear it while I break down her barrier again, and then you have to go in and grab her.” I nod dimly. “Don’t listen to what she says. Don’t let her see you. If she starts talking that blackspeak shit, you jump right back into the rift. Don’t fuck around with her, she’s a million times more qualified than you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious,” Ymir growls, and I look back into her face. “Do not. Fuck with her. She will kill your ass.”

I cast my eyes to the ground. The white-hot embers between my shoes look like tiny stars. 

“Stick with your teams. Baldy, Crossbow, Annie, and Reiner. Bert, you’re with me and necro-boy.”

Everyone nods, sweating in the heat. Reiner kneels down so that Connie and Sasha can clamber awkwardly onto his shoulders, and then he and Annie jump off and fall into Muspelheim. Bert shudders, ice crystals forming sharp and huge in his core. He looks down at us, I guess, waiting for his cue.

The fight above us breaks out instantly when they land. I watch little white figures knock aside waves of gooey titans. Reiner is a beast, wiping whole lines with a flick of his arm. I can’t even see Connie and Sasha from here. I count under my breath, waiting, watching them try to crowd control. Bert’s shade makes a weirdly nervous _whoosh_ sound. Five, six, seven… they’re pushing the blackened tide back, away from the crater that is the barrier. Ten, Eleven… a cloud moves over the scene. Red lightning crashes across it. Fire explodes from it like rain. It moves quickly. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I can almost hear the screams and the squeals.

Guilt makes me stupid. Guilt makes me stupid.

Ymir reaches out and grabs me, pulling me tight against her side. I yelp, suppressing the urge to struggle. She looks down at me around her fangs, considering. Her black pupils are huge, almost covering her eyes, and her freckles are faded against her dark skin. I can still see, though. There are four in a perfect line across the bridge of her nose.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Kirschtein,” she says. I open my mouth to respond, but she’s already whooping at Bert. His projection floats upward, weirdly graceful and weightless for something so fucking huge, and Ymir chuckles. “Hold on.”

When she jumps off, we shoot toward the burning planet like a fucking rocket lifting off, and I find myself grabbing at her shirt. Bert’s colossal shadow moves ahead of us and belly-flops onto a monstrous pack of titans, engulfing them in his frozen gullet. 

I feel gravity shifting, pressure increasing, and I’m dizzy again. It’s already boiling hot again. How did I stand this? Why am I doing this? 

Ymir shifts so that we don’t fall on our heads, but when she lets me go, I fall on my ass regardless. We’re safe in Bertholdt’s shade for now, dark and wispy and somewhere approaching freezing. Titans crack and freeze and fall to frozen ashes in this contained winter. Bert stands after a moment, after we’ve adjusted, and leaves a dozen piles of black ice on the red earth. 

I watch him float away to help the others, and I hear them yelling and fighting. Reiner’s fists are huge, crushing sloppy tar monsters like they’re insects, and Annie is too quick, too graceful to even compare. Connie and Sasha fight back to back, adjusting admirably.

“Jean! Focus!”

I jolt and sprint to catch up to Ymir, dodging growing puddles of half-congealed goop baking on the rapidly heating earth. Bert had pretty effectively cleared the area, but more titans are creeping over the hills toward us, and I wish more than anything that I hadn’t lost all my fucking weapons. Stupid. I cover Ymir, though, keeping watch as she breathes frost onto the barrier and shatters it with an insanely powerful kick. I know the tear will only last a moment. I roll through it, the closing edges tearing at my shoulders, and when it seals again I’m left in ringing silence.

Melinoë’s hovering like a snake at the edge of the rift. I watch it shift slowly, dizzyingly vast, and shake my head. She looks up at me and grins, toying with something in her withered fingers.

“Hi, Jean,” she rasps, twining a silvery thread around her twisted black fingertips. Her white arm is being pulled behind her in a tight grip, pinned against her back. It’s fighting harder against her now.

She unwinds from the ground, and I remember Ymir’s orders. But I’m frozen. I watch her play with this strand, this little shine that looks disturbingly familiar. Her formless legs slide over the hot earth toward me. I try not to look at the rift, try not to telegraph my movements.

“You’re here to kill me, right?” I glare at her, jaw clenched. Her hair spreads, wild and uncontrolled, and already it’s darker around us. She hovers in front of me, winding thin silver between her fingers over and over, eyeing me up and surrounding me and fuck. I can’t move. “I’m surprised that you figured me out so quickly. I commend you.” She smiles. I cringe. “You’re usually so slow at everything, aren’t you?”

“Shut your fucking face,” I grit out. I’m frozen. She’s cold, so cold, blocking out the burning heat around us more and more as it gets darker and darker.

“So personable,” she tuts, her breath smoky and foul. She moves around me slowly, fucking _slithering_ , and dangles the thread in my face. “I guess that’s why Marco _loved_ you so dearly, hmmm? Sweet Marco, furious Marco… why is he so angry?”

I shake against the urge to respond. Don’t give in. Don’t listen. She doesn’t even have Marco’s face to hide behind, so why can’t I move?

“You know what this is, baby boy?” She shakes the thread, then winds it between her bony black fingers.

Don’t listen. Don’t listen. I try to move my feet. My muscles are tense, reluctant, but they’re moving. 

“It’s you.” Her breath is thick in my ear, cracked lips pressed right up against my skin. “I took it from Marco.” 

That gives me pause. No, shit, don’t listen, but _what_?

She moves in front of me again and I realize too late that we’re completely ensconced in her darkness, her hatred, her vile wrath. The light filtering between the grimy strands of her hair is weak and growing weaker, and she’s rising above me, staring down at me with impossibly huge eyes. Fuck. My breaths are short, shaky, my heart hammering. The smoke making up her body is choking me, but I can’t fight against it. I feel myself growing powerless, like a tugging at my very core trying to pull me through the ground.

“Every memory of you, right here. I guess he doesn’t _need_ it that much, hmmm? He pretty much _begged_ me to take it from him, to release him from the suffering of knowing you. He was so tired of you, Jean.”

She grins, eyes shining through the shadow with a truly mad light. Tar seeps from her blackened eye and rolls down her bruised right cheek.

“You’re such a bother, Jean. He would have been fine if you just left him alone. At least, he thinks so. He regretted using you for a place to stay and a good _fuck_. He didn’t want to remember you anymore. You’re so clingy, you know that? You weighed him down. He was so annoyed. So I took you out.” 

I’m sinking. All I can see in the darkness is her smile, her fucking bloody, sharp teeth. They’re burning into my mind, so white-hot and all I can remember is the world spinning through my cracked windshield. My heart spasms in my chest. She’s over me now, stretching the thread tight between her fingers, threatening to snap it. I lean my head back to follow her grin, my neck aching, so small here in her world. I can’t feel my legs anymore, can’t feel my fingers, barely aware of the widening of my eyes as I stare up at her. 

“And now he’s fine. All better. Jean-free. _Cured_.” I choke. I can’t even breathe against her. Her hair wraps around us, long and impossibly dark, and the last tiny light seeping through is fading quickly. I know what’ll happen when it’s gone.

If she asks me if I want to die, I know what I’ll say.

“Where’s Marco, baby? Let’s bring him back.”

I open my mouth then. Just as her power returns my voice to me, Ymir’s claws rip through the shroud of Melinoë’s darkness and gash across her dark right eye. She howls, her hand coming up to hold it, the silvery thread of Marco’s memory smearing around in her blackened blood.

“Jean, _go!_ ”

I break free. Fuck. The fear rushes out of me and the emptiness it leaves is filled with white-hot fury. I want to kill her, destroy her, rip out everything inside of her and burn it while she watches. Marco's face flashes bright in my mind, lost to her manipulation. I stand and wrap my arms around Melinoë’s protruding ribs, powering the both of us back toward the rift. She screams and struggles, but for the moment she’s useless against me. I throw both of us over the edge.

This time, I just land back where I’d started. Christa jolts and moves in front of Marco, and I lean all of my weight on Melinoë’s struggling body, trying to keep her under control for now. She bucks and claws at me, screaming in my ear. I wish again for a weapon. When I reach my hand up, I dig my fingers deep into her punctured eye, and she screeches and spasms against me. "Stay the fuck down," I snarl, shoving deeper through slimy, stinking tar just to watch her writhe in pain.

Ymir lands hard on the ground next to us, so I roll away, and Ymir grabs Melinoë and holds her tight against her chest. Her claws shrink, as do her teeth, and soon she looks like she had before. Melinoë struggles against her grasp, unaided by the light half of her body. Ymir backs up, one hand gripping Melinoë's throat with crushing force, until she's holding her at the edge of the pool.

I reach out and yank the silver thread from Melinoë's flailing fingers, holding it tight to my chest as I back away.

“Historia,” Ymir shouts, and I’m confused for a moment, but Christa is already frantically sifting through her bones. When she finds what she's searching for, she chucks it past them into the pool. The water turns a deep red, hissing and bubbling. I look down at it, recognizing the red roofs of Old Trost. My brow furrows.

I squint harder, ignoring Melinoë’s screams, my mind hazy and trying to understand. There are people there, some huge ones thundering between buildings and some tiny ones zipping around like flies. Something like blood splatters across every surface. I don’t understand.

“Hey, Historia,” Ymir says, and the seer looks up at her sadly. Ymir swallows. Her dark eyes are actually filling with tears. Melinoë struggles against her chest, snarling but powerless against the titan's crushing grip. After a second, Ymir continues, her voice wavering. “You’ll find me, right?”

Christa smiles softly, tears spilling over her cheeks. “I always do.”

Ymir gives the seer a watery smile, then closes her eyes. She falls backwards into the pool, dragging Melinoë with her. The water explodes out of the pool like a bomb went off, blowing up into the stars, and then the space is hollow. I can see Muspelheim on the other side. Ymir and Melinoë are gone.

Christa sighs shakily, looking at her hands as she bites her lip. After a moment, she speaks tremulously. “It’ll take a long time for Niflheim’s runoff to fill this pool again… hopefully we won’t need it until then.”

“Wh-what—” I’m confused. So confused. I look from Christa to the hollow, then back. “What just happened?”

“Ymir took her to another universe. Another timeline. Somewhere where she won’t have the same power. There will be someone there who can fight her.” She stares up at Niflheim, searching for answers in the fog. “Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

My mind is whirling. I can’t make sense of any of this. My body hurts, and the silver thread burns in my palm. I stare down at it, then at Marco. He’s pale, sweatier than before, breathing hard. His throat’s working, his lips parting around voiceless words.

I look down at the thread again. Melinoë’s damned words echo in my head. I know she’s lying, I know she’s just fucking with me. I know Marco wouldn’t… he couldn’t just—

I bite my lip hard and wipe at the tears streaming down my face. Even if Marco didn’t beg for this… there’s a chance. There’s a chance she wasn’t lying about this being the part of me I had dug into Marco, a thread of all the absolute bullshit I’ve put him through. All the tension, the leading him on, the lying to him. There’s a chance that I’m holding all of that in my shaking palms.

I rip out my lighter, the Zippo from Jinae Flour Co., and I light the end of the silver thread on fire before I even have time to think twice about it. The gaping maw sighs, its breath hot and venomous, and the ashes of the thread whip away into the stars.

Staring after them, I let numbness come over me. I take the guilt in. I have to. I can’t ever do this to someone again. If I’d never tried, at least two people could have had a hope for a normal life. If I’d never fucking tried, maybe Marco would still be smiling at his church, softly intoning the words of his God and believing in something that actually makes sense to him.

I can’t ever do this again.

I feel myself dying. The pain hits me, the exhaustion, the anguish just all fucking pile-drives me at once.

The ground rushes up at me, and my vision shutters out just as my head hits the shining sand.

\--

I wake up in the hospital. I feel grungy and sweaty, but above all else I’m fucking _aching_. I whimper and curl onto my side, easing the pressure on my busted rib. Huge padding covers my nose, which I can’t breathe through. 

“Hey, quit moving,” comes Reiner’s voice. I blink around the room, then look over my shoulder at him. He’s fiddling with my IV. “You’re all kinds of fucked up. Calm down.”

“What—”

Reiner shakes his head, indicating that now is not the time. Probably understandable. I give a shuddering sigh. 

Then I remember, remember Marco gasping on the sand--

When I jolt up, the pain that rolls through my mostly-dead body completely zaps my brain for a minute. I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp. 

“Yeah. Stop moving.”

I stare up at Reiner, breathing growing frantic, my pulse speeding. “Marco—”

“Is fine. He’s fine. He’s in another room.”

I relax for just a second, but the feeling doesn’t last. I’m sinking again. My chest fucking aches, a deep, throbbing pain. 

One last time. Just once, I wanna see his face before I have to force myself to let go of him forever. 

I swing my legs out of the bed with a groan. 

“Where is he.”

“Calm yourself, Kirschtein,” Reiner says, gently pushing me back onto my bed. “Give it a few hours. He’s down the hall. Half his bones were broken, and he had some pretty serious internal bleeding, but he’s gonna be fine. Annie knows what she’s doing.”

I look up at him again, still feeling helpless. Hopeless. I hate this feeling. I scrub my palm over my forehead, wiping away sickly sweat. I must look like absolute shit. More so than usual, I mean.

I wait it out, though. Reiner parks it by my bed and fills me in. Apparently once Melinoë had vacated the universe, the fire titans just sort of… bumbled. They’re still there, wandering aimlessly across Muspelheim and staring up at the sky like fucking turkeys. He says they’ll stay that way, brainless, until Loki rolls by to wake up Surt. I’m still completely fuzzy on the details of how that works, and Reiner refused to answer my questions once they got too high up the food chain. Christa moved up here, to Midgard, and Reiner worked his magic to get her in as a pediatric nurse. Seems fitting.

Annie and Bert are alive. Connie and Sasha are alive, although severely rattled and with a few new burn scars. And Marco’s alive. Unconscious still, but alive. Alive.

Throughout all this debriefing, my mind is buzzing. 

When Reiner leaves, I cover my face with my pillow and try not to think. It doesn’t work.

I think for hours, obsessing and rationalizing until my head hurts and I’m thoroughly exhausted, and I pass out again without removing the pillow from my face.

When I’m finally allowed to get up, Reiner makes me let him wheel me down to Marco in a stupid wheelchair. Stupid. Why? My legs are fine. He feeds me some crap about stressing my lungs, stressing my ribs. I just stare at him. He gives me a weak smile and tries not to notice the slackness of my face, the way I blink for a few seconds too long. Slowing down.

He wheels me toward an open door at the end of the hallway. Before he can push me inside, though, I reach out and brace my hands against the doorframe, keeping myself outside. I can feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.

“Jean—”

“Don’t,” I interrupt harshly. I stare into the dim room, blinds drawn to block out the sunlight. I can see him there on the bed, but I can’t bring myself to go to him. I just sit there in the doorway, watching him not move, probably asleep or halfway there.

I linger for a while. Reiner is pulled away by another nurse, and he warns me to not try to move until he comes back.

Once he’s out of sight, I’m out of the chair, and _fuck_ it hurts. 

I leave the hospital, trying not to make eye contact or let on how fucked my body is. I don’t look back.

\--

I can’t stand the silence of my apartment. After ten minutes of this buzzing, aching solitude, I rip out the drawers in my desk in my desperate search for the ancient brick iPod I know is around here somewhere. Anything, I need anything. My mind’s an unfocused mess, every thought half-formed and dying mid-sentence.

When I find it, it’s somehow still got battery, and I jam the headphones into my ears while I suck down another cigarette. 

Apparently all I have on this thing is fucking sad hipster bullshit. It must have gotten mixed up with Armin’s again. But you know what, this is probably as much as I deserve. All I want is to block out the silence pressing deafening against me, crushing my chest and reminding me how much of a fuck-up I really am.

I roll my shoulders and let the sappy music wash over me. I hold smoke in my chest until it makes me dizzy before I let it roll out of my lungs.

I can already feel bad things happening to me.


	11. The Boy With The Broken Halo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Never forget the choices you make.
> 
> I'll never forget you, Marco.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> serious shout-out to [cyntherr](http://cyntherr.tumblr.com) on tumblr for the red rose tattoo idea and to [hdotk](http://hdotk.tumblr.com) for really nailing it into my skull go check them out

The whiskey under the sink isn’t enough. It lasts two days. When I crawl into the shady liquor store a few blocks down the next morning, barely primed on the warm dregs at the bottom, I buy another two bottles and let myself sink into them. It’s a drunken haze of chain-smoking on my floor and one particularly well-suited song on repeat filling my bleary head.

I can’t even bring myself to look at the bed where we’d made love for the only time. I can’t stand the couch where we’d tangled ourselves together and laughed like we’d always have each other. Like there was time. Every part of my apartment is teeming with his ghost, and everywhere I look I see his sleepy bedhead smile and his face stuffed with pizza and his confused, lip-biting squint as he tries to understand me.

What had started out as leaning against my kitchen counter, curled around myself and staring at the floor, becomes a full-out sprawl on my back. Just like back then, that time… that time where all I could do was scream and wait for him to die. 

I stare at the swirling ceiling for days. I feel myself getting smaller and smaller, weaker and weaker.

It's easy to avoid people. Connie banging on my door, Reiner reasoning with the painted wood, Levi fuming and smoking and trying to reach me. I keep the lights off and hope I've tricked them into believing that I was brave enough to leave this salted earth behind me.

The hallucinations start sometime after I’ve completely given up on standing. Last time I tried I just fell right back over anyway. 

There are blurry things crawling on the ceiling. They dart through the shadows and watch me fall apart on my goddamned kitchen floor. I grab for the bottle next to me, knocking over the two empties before I find the one I’m looking for. They watch me take a thick, deep gulp, not even wincing at the burn anymore, and skitter toward the door somewhere above my head.

The sound of the door opening is just another facet to the delusion. I barely hear it through the headphones jammed into my ears, trailing to the now-lifeless iPod somewhere beside me.

I know this is a particularly vicious mirage when Marco’s face appears above me, pale worry painted over his beautiful freckles. I reach up to him, vaguely aware of the tears spilling down over my ears.

The tug on my arm jolts me into a complete blackout.

When I wake up again, I’m on this fucking bed, and the lingering smell of his hair on the pillow my face is half-buried in makes me want to scream. My head is pounding, though, and it hurts to even breathe at this point.

Marco’s ghost is still there, sitting next to the bed. I wonder how long he’ll stay my Marco before my mind warps him into a new torment.

Fuck it.

I reach for him, vision swimming with tears and residual drunkness, and he leans closer to me with a soft sound. He presses my hand to his cheek and squeezes his eyes shut. It looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

I’m whispering his name, I realize. Over and over. He’s not here, I know he’s not, but it feels good to just pretend.

“Marco,” I mumble, a little louder, and he opens his eyes. They’re bloodshot, watery. “Marco, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” the apparition whispers to me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat, and the words sliding past my dry lips remind me of how much this fucking _hurts_. I’ll take a phantom over silence, though. I say it again and again, until my voice is thick with tears and the pillow under my head is soaked.

“Jean,” the ghost mumbles, moving closer. He even has a cast on his right hand, and the barest hint of blood in his eye. It’s so cruel. “Jean, why are you apologizing?”

I’m blubbering. I scratch my nails through imaginary black strands, marveling at how clean and untangled they are. I’d forgotten this feeling. I apologize again, then bite down cruelly on my lip.

He watches me with tired, tear-filled eyes, and I let it out.

“I’m sorry, Marco,” I say, louder than the whisper I’d been rasping. “I’m sorry I love you.”

The ghost sucks a sharp breath in between his teeth, his eyes widening. He bites his lip, then squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face in my hand as his shoulders shake.

I’m apologizing again. Again and again. I can’t stop. Until the phantom surges forward and presses his lips against mine. This dream is too cruel. He feels so sweet against me, his lips soft and trembling, his cheeks wet with salty tears. 

“Go to sleep, Jean,” the ghost whispers against my lips, his breath hitching, and I do.

\--

I’m alone when I finally wake up. Of course I am. I’ve been alone this whole time. Marco probably can’t even walk, he doesn’t have a key to my apartment, and he hopefully doesn’t even remember that I exist. I pray that Reiner tells him he got hit by a bus or something. Something normal, something to explain the last few weeks. 

You had an accident, Marco. You were in a coma. Go home, Marco. Go home and recover and live.

I’ll never go home again.

I pull myself out of the bed to get away from the ghost trailing his fingers up my spine, soft like a warm breath. There’s nothing there when I check to make sure out of the corner of my eye.

Need to figure out what day it is. _Fuck_ , my head’s killing me. I’d dragged out the binge-drinking so I never had to be hungover, and now it’s all hitting me like a goddamn truck.

When I’m done puking my guts out (or rather, trying valiantly to convince my body to stop heaving because there’s nothing there), I shower and change my clothes and grab my keys. I don’t feel better. Just a little more human.

It’s cold out now, like it should be in early January. Not arctic, not late spring, just… normal. Normal Trost shit. 

I head to the corner store. I desperately need more cigarettes. Manny’s behind the counter again, playing his stupid handheld, but he drops it to the side when I come in. “Hey, _guapo_ , where you been hiding?”

I hold up three fingers and dig in my wallet. He drops five packs on the counter and only takes a ten from me. I’m not complaining. “Work got shitty, Manny. Nothing big.”

“Joe says he’s been hearing weird noises. Everything okay?”

Raising my eyebrows, I take the bag and pull out a pack to slap against my palm. “Yeah? Like what kind?”

“I dunno man, he said… _what was it… ‘crawling and hissing?’_ ”

“From where?” I open the box and slide a cigarette between my lips, shoving the pack into my back pocket, already in business mode. It helps me forget. Crawling sounds usually aren’t spirits, might be something in the walls…

“Your apartment.”

… Okay, weird. I think back on the black shades on my ceiling and squint at the transparent plastic counter, looking at all the bright-colored candy underneath. “I haven’t heard it,” I say finally, looking up at him.

“You look like crap.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really.” He leans closer to me, sniffing. “And you smell like booze.”

I sigh and wiggle the cigarette between my lips, then give a lopsided shrug. “Rough week.”

He shakes his head, leaning down on the counter. “If you need anything, let me know, okay? I’m here for you.”

“Manny,” I laugh, stuffing my hands in my hoodie pockets. I run my thumb over the smooth metal of the Zippo. “You’re like 12.”

“I’m 17 now, man.”

“Oh yeah? Happy birthday.”

“Stop changing the subject.”

Scratching at my stubbly cheek, I avert my eyes. These people all know me too well, but not at all simultaneously. Part of the Big Lie that I call life, I guess. “Thanks, Manny. I’ll be okay.” Just piling it on thick.

“No you won’t.” I glance up at him, scowling slightly, but he just levels me with his weirdly mature, dark stare. “You did this last time too, when something real bad happened to that blonde kid. I don’t wanna see that shit again. Talk to me, or Joe, or _abuela_. Okay?”

I stare at the array of cleaning products to my left. Too damn well. Maybe I should move.

I can’t think of anything to say, so I give him an honest stare, and I can feel myself slowing down again. Shrinking. His eyebrows furrow, but I just reach out wordlessly. He shakes my hand firmly, says something short, something akin to a prayer, and I leave before I just start bawling in the middle of this cramped corner store.

Not that I really think I can cry anymore. I think I’m broken.

When I get back to my apartment, I notice I must have cleaned up the bottles at some point. They’re in the recycle bin, drained dry and capped and arranged neatly at the bottom. 

Further back under the sink is a half-full bottle of truly sinus-clearing cheap Canadian whiskey. It’ll do. I leave it on the counter and move to my calendar to try and catch up on the days, the weeks I’ve lost to this madness.

School starts up next week for the freshmen. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to stand up in front of all those doe-eyed little kids, so optimistic and unaware, without puking my cynicism all over them. They don’t deserve it.

\--

When I walk into the tattoo shop the next day, I try not to stumble. It doesn’t work. The artist pokes her head up from her sketchbook, and several expressions pass over her cute face. Surprise that someone’s in so early. A smile when she sees it’s me. A dark frown when she sees the state I’m in. Petra tucks her bright red bangs behind her ear and stands, putting her pencil to the side.

“Jean, are you drunk?”

I just give her a half-hearted shrug and lean on the counter. “Think you can do a new piece for me?”

“You look terrible, and I’m pretty certain you’re well over the legal limit.” She comes forward and reaches out to my face, so I close my eyes and lean into her cold fingers as they brush my cheek. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

“The apocalypse.”

She gives me a grim stare, then sighs. “I can’t ink you when you’re drunk, you know that. You might bleed out.” I give her a look, and she knows that look more than well enough. She sighs and alters her tactic. “If you bleed all over my shop, it’ll make a big mess, and I’ll have to go through hell with the health department.” Ah, appealing to my reluctance to be a bother. Excellent move.

I stick my lip out, trying to be cute, but I’m one hundred percent sure it comes across as pathetic instead. “Please, Petra?” She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s really important.”

“Tell me what it is. And why it’s so important.” A pause. “And maybe I’ll think about it.”

“I wanna add onto the sunflower. Something… wait, which flower is it that represents martyrs?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “In Christianity? Red roses. Jean, what have you been getting into? Is everything okay?”

I laugh and lean my forehead on my crossed forearms. Is everything okay, she asks. I shake my head, knowing Petra will see through me no matter what lies I try to push past her, and sniffle a bit. It hurts. “No. It’s not okay. But I’ll make it, I guess.”

I feel Petra considering me, followed after a while by the sound of her crossing to the small back room. “Hey, Erd,” comes her voice, made a little less bright by her concern for me. “Can you take that portrait at 2? I don’t know if I’ll be done by then.”

An agreement, then Petra comes back. I continue staring into the vent between my feet. There’s a quarter down there, along with a million years’ worth of dust and grime. “Alright, wino, come on back. You gotta drink water, though, and you have to tell me if you start getting light-headed.”

“Thank you, Petra,” I mumble, peeling myself off her counter and moving to her desk chair. She pulls out her table and unfolds it, setting it up and spraying it down and covering it, not looking at me the whole time. I unzip my hoodie and toss it over the back of the chair, then pull off my shirt.

When she turns to face me, she sucks in a breath at the state of my torso. It’s just as black and blue as the rest of me, spotted with little burns, and some stitches over my broken rib. I think they put a plate in, but there’s no way to be sure.

“God, Jean,” she murmurs, coming close to me. She’s almost a foot shorter than me. I stare at the top of her head as she spreads her fingers over my ribs, leaning close to examine me. Gone are the days where her gentle touches gave me massive hard-ons, I guess. It’ll make getting inked by her that much easier. “Alright. Where were you thinking?”

I trail my fingers over the stem of the sunflower, then spread my fingers over my stomach. Right where Marco’s sigil was. “I guess, the stem wrapping around and the head here.”

“Thorns or no thorns?”

I pause, chewing on my chapped lip. “No thorns.”

“Okay. Get comfy.”

I flop onto the table and lace my fingers behind my head while she gets her shit together. Machine, power supply, inks, paper towels… I know the process pretty well by now. When she scoots her chair over to me, holding a cheap plastic razor, I let my arms relax by my sides before she can ask. Shaving my chest is easy. I am not exactly gifted with a wealth of chest hair.

She freehands it with a light blue Sharpie in silence, and I close my eyes. It doesn’t take long. Petra’s amazing with pretty things, always has been. Her portfolio is a straight flower shop, overflowing with vibrant roses and weeping purple flowers and clusters of tiny blue petals, and a picture of me with a shit-eating grin and a bright, shiny sunflower on my weedy chest from six years ago. 

“How’s that?”

“Perfect,” I murmur without opening my eyes, and she huffs a little. I trust her, though, and she knows it. 

As she starts, I can feel her staring up at me. “If you pass out or die, I’m tattooing ‘I’m a dumbass’ across your forehead.” She’s not kidding. I give her a half-smile, and the click-buzz of her machine is enough for me to know that my inadequate offering is accepted.

She leans on my busted ribs while she lines the rose, and I try my best to deal with both that pain and the buzzing that vibrates my sternum. It could be worse. Eventually, like that word you repeat so many times that it stops looking real, the pain fades out into just _weirdness_. Erd, the other guy working, comes by to press a bottle of room-temperature water into my hand. I thank him quietly. I take brief sips of it between Petra reloading, and as she stabs her way down into the petals, she finally asks, “You gonna tell me what this is about?”

“Do you wanna know?”

“You always tell me their stories,” she mumbles, glancing up at me. 

I purse my lips. “Dunno that I wanna talk about it,” I say finally, closing my eyes again. 

“Now or ever?”

I have to really, honestly think about that question. “I wonder,” I murmur finally, and she just gives a hummed assent. She’s always understood me a little too well.

I zone out. Petra tells me about how she and this dweeby dude she went to school with are going out now, after he’d courted her for roughly a thousand years. He’s sweet, but awkward, and has this awful habit of biting the shit out of his tongue. She tells me about this massive piece she did last week. Twelve straight hours! Guy sat like a champ. 

She quietly reminds me that I told her all about werewolf ex-boyfriends while I’d cried into my shirt, and how she’d just told me to stop sobbing because it was gonna fuck up her lines, even as she held my shaking hand tight in her firm, soothing grip.

They’d taken out my thigh stitches in the hospital, so that’s a lingering tightness I don’t have to worry about anymore. The trailing edges of the slashes have started scarring over, including the pale pink wandering up over the full moon, nestled low on the back of my hip bone. That one had hurt like a bitch. More so than the other phases.

“You’re not crying this time,” she mumbles after I don’t give her a response.

“Nope,” I say finally, refusing to open my eyes. Her needle drags over my innards, flourishing the edges of the petals and trailing down toward my navel. It feels weird, the stinging, burning sensation running over my fleshy parts. Even with the slick ointment she slides over my skin, I can feel the friction of the hot needle.

“Is that good or bad?”

I sigh. She pulls off the lines and I hear her switching out her machine. 

“Done the lines, gonna start the colors. Sure you don’t wanna look at it?”

I shake my head, taking another good swig of water. My head is starting to hurt, my mouth dry, and I think about all the chemical mechanisms behind alcohol-induced dehydration. I guess I was making a face, because Erd’s back, and he’s pressing four bright orange ibuprofen into my palm. I nod my thanks and down them, and he moves to set up his station.

“Hey, Petra,” I sigh after she finishes filling out the stem, giving an uncomfortable shift.

“Need a break?”

“Just a minute, yeah. It’s kinda sore.”

She puts her machine on the saran wrap stuck to the counter and strips her gloves, cracking her knuckles and waving off the moisture. “What’s with the stitches over here?”

“I dunno,” I reply, finishing the water. Erd takes the empty bottle and replaces it. So helpful. “I think they put a plate in.”

“A plate?” She squints at me, then gasps, pinning me with a horrified stare. “Your _ribs_ are broken?!” 

“I didn’t mention that?” I give her a half-grin, but my teeth are gritted against the dull pain.

“I ought to punch you in them!”

“Please don’t,” I whimper, instinctively moving away from her. Her hand grips my thigh, though, and the fire in her eyes lets me know I probably should have kept that a secret for a while longer. “Oh god, don’t kill me—”

“ _I ought to,_ ” she growls. For a midget, she can be really terrifying. “Jean, what the hell.”

“It’s only one,” I try, and she stares harder. “I got punched pretty good.”

“So good they had to put in a _plate_ , Jean? How have you not passed out yet? I’ve been inking all over your chest!”

I shrug, gulping more water. Sobriety isn’t helping my case. 

She stares at me, then shakes her head, and Erd comes to lean on the table above me. “She’s gonna shank you one of these days, if you keep omitting these details,” he says, lips curling up in a grin. I just stare up at him, my expression a mix of exasperation and mild fear. 

Petra grumbles, and I hear her snap on a new pair of gloves. She doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the coloring, just focusing on what she’s doing and occasionally elbowing me in the hip. Pointy bone on pointy bone.

Erd talks to me until the portrait appointment comes in, a talkative girl with a million teeth that never really seem to retreat behind her lips. I close my eyes while she natters on for a while, and when Petra puts down her shader again and rubs ointment over my whole tattoo, I breathe a sigh of relief.

I look down at the tattoo for the first time. It’s exactly what I wanted. A reminder. That’s what all my tattoos are, reminders, and this one is just as potent to me as the one it’s wound around. It’s elegantly done, too, perfectly matching her previous work. 

Before I can pull my shirt on, Petra pulls me into the little back room and closes the door.

“Spill,” she mumbles as she reaches up to pull the batteries out of the smoke detector. I snort a little.

“I told you, I don’t—”

“Yeah, I don’t really care,” she says over me, crossing her arms and legs in her chair. 

She’s clearly serious. I sigh and run a hand down my face, then pull my pack out of my back pocket. “Can I get a bandage first?”

Petra obliges me, thankfully, and with the thick pad taped to my chest, I light a cigarette and start at the beginning.

\--

It’s not like I tell her everything. Just whatever she needs to know in order to understand why I dealt with tattoo pain on top of bone pain on top of heart pain while half-drunk. She understands a little too well, and by the time I’m done, her hands are gripping tight into tiny, white-knuckled fists.

“So that’s it?”

I blink up at her through the smoke of something like my tenth cigarette. My chest is killing me. Has been this whole time; I haven’t given my lungs a break all week. Gives me something to do with my hands. “What d’you mean?”

“You’re just… not even gonna try to find out?”

“Why should I?” I grimace and grind out the cigarette, leaning back in my chair. The bandage shifts wetly across my chest. “He doesn’t need me.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

Lacing my fingers in my lap, I furrow my brow. “I just know, man. He was doing fine before me, and he’ll keep doing fine without.”

“It doesn’t sound like he was doing fine.” I stare back up at her through my bangs. “He was broken enough that a _nymph_ could possess him, Jean. She wasn’t a spirit, she had form. Her possession ripped apart his insides and put him in the hospital. That had to have been a pretty big hole, if you ask me.”

“He seemed well-adjusted enough.” Her words are giving me chills. I’m trying not to believe her.

“He probably _lied_. Just like he did about seeing things at the church. He sounds like the kind of person that hides things to avoid bothering people. Just like you.”

That honestly hadn’t occurred to me. I stare at her, feeling hopeless again, the happy façade I’d been working on crumbling like ash. 

“Go see him,” she says, standing up and waving her hands through the smoke near the low ceiling. “If he doesn’t remember you, fine. But if he does, Jean...” She turns to me again, worry spread across her face, genuine concern. I look at the floor. “Please make the right choice.”

\--

The spare, cheap cell phone at the bottom of my nightstand is long dead. Of course it is. I pull out the tangled charger and plug it in, sitting at my desk crammed in the corner so I can just stare at the wall instead of the rest of the room. The phone turns on with an obnoxious whooshing noise and takes an eternity to boot up.

When it’s finally functional, I delete Dot Pixis’s phone number from my contacts. No need for it anymore.

Thankfully, Marco’s number isn’t here either. I don’t know that I could bring myself to delete it, and I know for a fact that I can’t be trusted with it.

I scroll up to Connie’s number and dial it, digging my hand into my hair as I lean onto my desk. The whole world feels like shit and my head hurts so badly that the bland electronic ringing in my ear is almost too much. 

“Jean?”

Licking my lips, I clear my throat before replying. “Hey, Connie. Can you do me a huge favor?”

“Jean, where the fuck have you been? I’ve been going to your apartment, everyone has. We know you’re in there. Sasha said we should just break down the door.”

“I just…” I lay my head on the desk and close my eyes. “I just didn’t want to talk to anyone, okay?”

“No. Not okay. You better not have just been laying in there and crying into a fucking bottle of Jack.”

Ha. I ignore that. “Do you have a spare key to my apartment?”

“Uhh,” he responds, clearly sensing my switch but having the good grace to let me dodge it. “No, not anymore. You never gave me a new one after your old door got wrecked. Why, did you lose them?”

Swallowing nervously, I breathe out slowly. “No, just wondering. Listen, can you do me a favor?”

“That really depends.”

“Can you…” I open my eyes and stare down at the wood, trying to will myself to say his name. I don’t think I can do it. “Can you go to the hospital and check on him?”

A long pause. “Check on who?”

“Connie.”

I can almost hear Connie scrubbing his hand over his close shave as he huffs into the phone, his annoyance booming into my ear. “No.”

“Connie—”

“No fucking way, Jean. I’m not doing this again. I won’t help you avoid your problems. Especially not this time, not a chance.”

I furrow my brow, glaring at the desk. “What does that mean?”

“I won’t do it, man. A blind man could see how fucking head over heels you are. Stop pretending you can make everything better by disappearing. No, Jean, you have to do this yourself. Just go see Marco. Go talk to him.”

“No.”

“Jean—”

“Sorry, Connie,” I say shortly, unable to contain my irritation. “I’m going through a tunnel.”

“Oh, shut up,” he says, and I can hear him stomping around his apartment. “You really think this is going to make things better? How is this going to help you at all?”

“It’s not about me.”

He pauses, thinking. Loudly. “How do you think Marco feels about all this? Doesn’t his input matter to you?”

“He doesn’t know,” I spit. I can feel my bones breaking under that. “He doesn’t remember anything about any of this, and don’t you dare tell him.”

“How could you possibly know that?” The words ring familiar in my mind.

“I took care of it. Just like I said I would.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Thanks. Love you too.”

“Jean, stop. Stop joking around and brushing this off. Go talk to him yourself. If he doesn’t remember you, just say you’re whatever kind citizen took him to the hospital.”

“Why on god’s green earth would I do that?”

“Because,” Connie says, almost hollering in my ear, and I wince. A dull thud wracks my brains. “He’s fucking good for you, you moron. He’s a legitimately nice dude, and he puts up with your ass, and you need the fucking centering. If you pretend nothing happened, he may have forgotten, but you never will, and that’s going to kill you slowly. I refuse to let that happen.”

I just stare at the desk. Tears don’t come. Just the aching in my chest, the empty feeling spreading through my fingertips. The feeling of shutting off.

“If you don’t talk to him, I will have my wedding at his teeny church, and either you have to deal with the shade I will throw you for the next seventy years for skipping out on being my best man, or you will have to deal with Sasha’s endless family crammed into all those little pews and fighting each other. Also, I will spend the entire reception playing wingman until Marco has no choice but to love you. You _know_ my wingman skills, do not fuck with me on this.”

A laugh cracks up from my aching lungs. It’s dry, and almost humorless, but Sasha’s nine sisters alone making a mess of Marco’s little church is enough to make me feel some measure of alive. 

This is why Connie is my best friend. It’s shit like this.

“Connie,” I say after a while, just before he starts screaming and asking if I’ve hung up. “I…”

“I know, dude,” he says softly. It’s the same voice, the same as he always gives me. The ‘we’ll get it figured out.’ The ‘let’s make it right.’ The voice of a man who can fix shit by taking action instead of by hiding. “I know it sucks. But remember, you were just at ground zero, okay? We’ll get it together. We’ll get it figured out. But you still have homework, man. You still have to go see him.”

Another long pause. I sigh, closing my eyes. Not telling him how scared I am because I don’t have to. Not telling him how guilty I feel because he already knows.

“Let me know how it goes.”

I lick my lips again before I agree. “… Thanks, Connie.”

“Anytime, man. I will kick your ass.”

“I can take you.”

“As if. See ya.”

“See you.”

\--

The night passes, and then Sunday comes before I really have time to make up an excuse. I didn’t sleep, but I dumped out the rest of the sink whiskey. It’s been too many days now, and I’m too weak to resist the urge to drown out my constant thoughts of him. I regret it every time I twist in my desk chair enough to see any parts of him that are still there. 

I leave on impulse. Before I have time to really start doubting Petra and Connie.

It’s raining, but I still make the walk north, trying to stall for time. Trying to organize my thoughts. I fail miserably. Every thought is half-formed, and it all ends in the same place.

 _“Hi,”_ he’ll say brightly, pulling on his new vestment. _“Can I help you?”_

I lean against the outside of the church and smoke for a while. My hood keeps sliding back, and my bangs are sloppy and wet against my face. They’re sticking to my eyebrows, creeping into my eyes, and no matter how hard I try I can’t keep them slicked back.

The bell tolls ten before I steel myself enough to pull open the door to the church. The narthex is empty, but it lacks the sinister air from my previous two visits. I can hear a sermon coming from inside the sanctuary, and it takes me another ten minutes on a bench with my head in my hands, leg bouncing agitatedly, to be able to move toward the wide white doors.

When I pull the door open, I check if the coast is clear first. All heads toward the front. A pillar blocks the preacher from my view. I’d be lying if I said I could ever forget the sound of his voice. He’s speaking slowly, sadly, but I can still hear the hope kept burning by his faith. 

I creep toward a pew, keeping the column between us. My awkward movements attract a gaze or two. Nothing enough to cause a disturbance. There are two little kids playing in the unsupervised space blocked by the pillar, my invisible hovel, so I tap them on the shoulders and make scooting motions. They escape fairly quickly, presumably because my face looks like it got hit by a cement truck. I hop quietly over the stiff wooden back, pulling my hood more firmly over my head, and try to become one with this uncomfortable seat in the house of a God I don’t believe in.

I lose track of what he says. The schism in my household after my death has made me wary of these words now, scared and alone. I’ve felt that shit too much lately. His voice is soothing, though, and I can feel his strength returning. When I close my eyes and sink further into my seat, hands deep in my pockets, I feel something almost like calm seeping over me. Something like peace.

The sounds of people leaving jolts me into wakefulness. I hide deeper in my corner, not making a sound, pretending to not exist. No one talks to me. It’s quiet after the flood of people, but for the sounds of a few kids laughing and talking quickly, and Marco’s soft, hesitant Chinese echoing through the still air. I don’t dare move. I just listen.

The girl that sits next to me scares the bejeezus out of me. Thin, long black hair, a small smile. I look from her to the rest of the sanctuary, searching, but I still can’t see him.

“Are you hiding from Marco?” Her voice is soft, her Chinese accent lilting through her words, and I look at her with wide, panicked eyes. She’s gonna give me away. “Don’t worry,” she continues with a laugh, amused by my expression. “They can’t see either of us.”

As she smiles at me, I stare at her, sitting in full view of where Marco’s conversation is coming from.

Oh.

I sink deeper into my seat and sniff. “Why are you still here?”

She pulls her hair over her shoulder, combing her fingers through it. I have to say, it’s a relief to see long black hair that falls flat and soft and isn’t trying to kill me. “Marco tried very hard to save me,” she says, and I look from her fingers back to her face. “He made sure that my last few weeks were comfortable. I owe him very much.”

“Sorry for your loss,” I mumble. She smiles and shakes her head, waving it off. “He can’t see you?”

“No, I mask myself from him. I think it would hurt him if he knew I hadn’t moved on yet.” I nod. Makes sense. I wonder how that’s different from what I’m doing. The whole being dead thing is probably a major factor. “Do you speak Chinese?”

I shake my head, and to my surprise, she gives me a sad frown and bites her lip. She jerks her chin toward the Marco party, and I hear more children talking loudly. I chance a peek around the column.

Marco’s there, in his priest clothes and all, bouncing a little kid on his good knee. My heart does some uncomfortable phlump, and sharp anxiety creeps into my gut. His other leg is stretched out in front of him, the thick plaster cast mostly covered by his robes, and my heart gives another guilty jolt. He’s smiling a little, though, just a tiny bit as he allows the child to play with his good fingers. I can’t tell from here whether it reaches his eyes, and I duck behind the column before I can.

“They are talking about you, you know,” the girl says, and I raise an eyebrow at her. She listens to the child’s babble for a moment. “’Marco, there was a strange man in church today,’” she translates for me. A pause, just a moment too long, before Marco replies and she continues. “’Oh, really?’” The kid’s enthusiastic response. “’Yes! Yes, he’s still here, n-next to…’” she lowers her gaze, sadness crossing her face. “Next to Yunli.”

Marco gives a questioning hum, and even as my heart skips a beat, I can’t look away from Yunli’s face. She sighs, though, and rakes a hand through her bangs as Marco responds. “’I do not see them’—oh, he said it the wrong way,” she murmurs, laughing in spite of the wet sheen to her dark eyes. 

They talk for a while longer, but Yunli has stopped translating for me. She considers me instead, then bites her lip.

“You are being very cruel to him, Jean.” 

I furrow my brow at her. I suppress my initial instinct to get pissy and tell her off, though, both in interest of hiding and because something about her presence is more soothing than most spirits. Instead, I tilt my head and give her a questioning look. Maybe it’s a little snotty. I can only do so much.

“He returned from the hospital last night, along with a kind young man. Armin, I think.” My eyebrows shoot up. That’s someone who hasn’t come beating down my door. I can understand why, though, and Armin knows too. Having him in my space when I’m like this wouldn’t do either of us any good. Yunli watches my face, then continues. “He misses you so much. When Armin left, he just… he stayed up all night and tried to do his work, but he kept putting his head down. He was shaking badly.”

I shake my head, pulling my hood back over my hair. “No,” I murmur, staring at the floor between our feet. “He doesn’t remember. Probably just his pain.”

“I don’t think so,” Yunli says firmly, leaning back and crossing her arms, looking stern for the first time. “He is taking his medication as he should, I checked.” She leans forward into my space then, long hair swinging over her shoulder. “Besides, I don’t remember seeing the words, ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid Jean’ anywhere in the Bible.”

It can’t be. I stare harder at the floor, willing myself to not believe her. She’s standing, though, and as soon as she does she’s gone. 

I realize I’m no longer hidden. 

I look up at him through my bangs, trying to shrink in on myself like a cornered animal, and he stares down at me through new glasses. They still have a sticker on one arm. 

That stupid sticker reminds me that I love him so much that my chest is in danger of bursting, and it takes everything I have to not vault over the back of the pew and run until I’ve hit the other side of the country. I settle for bouncing my leg agitatedly and picking at some miniscule fuzzies on my hoodie.

Marco turns to his group and says something, slowly and carefully. They all get the picture and depart, saying ‘bye-bye’ approximately twelve times apiece, and Marco waves until the sanctuary doors close behind them and the silence fills in deep. 

A few moments pass before Marco edges into the pew next to me. I crush myself against the wall to allow him space, for his leg and for his sanity. I notice then, when he drops them into the pew in front of us, that he’s moving around on crutches. Guilt again. Stabbing, burning, stinging, I should leave, I should—

Marco stretches out his leg as best he can, his foot edging into my space, and rests his hands in his lap. His right is bound in a bright blue cast, several fingers splinted up so they can heal.

Neither of us speak at first. I stare up at the front of the sanctuary. No big fancy windows, no ornate crosses with a dying savior, just… simple. There’s a mess of flowers up there, though, bright and beautiful and much livelier than the ones I’d held when we first met. It’s nice. Pretty.

“What brings you here today?” he asks after a while, not looking at me.

I knew it. 

I close my eyes and lick my lips, sinking deeper into the creeping numbness taking over for the butterflies. I knew it.

Just go with it.

“Someone told me I should come.”

He hums, running an idle finger over rough plaster. “Who was that?”

“My tattoo artist.” I lean forward, bracing my elbows on my knees, and bury my face in my hands. If I had it in me, I’m sure I’d be feeling panicked, trapped. All I feel is tired. So goddamn tired. My sinuses burn like tears are coming, but I’m sure I don’t have any left.

“Did you get a new one?” He’s still not looking at me. I nod anyway.

“Something to remind me of someone I knew once.” The pain of that curls sharp in my gut, and the catch of my shirt over the rose’s drying ink scabs sends out a tingling pulse that threatens to consume me.

“I see.”

I don’t respond. I can’t think of anything to say or do or think. Just… loss. Crushing loss. I need to leave.

“Can I see it?”

I look at him out of the corner of my eye, eyebrows raised. Well, Marco always was the curious type. Asking about the piercings, the sunflower, always questions. This is just another to add to the pile. I sigh and stand slowly, turning to him as I lift up my shirt and my hoodie.

It probably looks dry, possibly crusty. I forgot to put lotion on it. It aches, a burning sensation, but the cold air of the church feels good against it. Leaning against the pillar, I let him get a good look, eyes shut tight.

He doesn’t reach out to touch me like he had before. I didn’t notice how much I enjoyed that until suddenly it’s improper for him to feel up a guy he doesn’t know. 

I pull my shirt down again, stuffing my hands in my hoodie pocket and sulking. I stare down at his cast and search for an excuse to run.

After a long time, he sighs, running his good hand through his hair and leaving it standing on end. “How do you live with all this guilt, Jean?”

My heart stops.

“Wh-what?”

He looks up at me again, his face painted with pain. “Unless it’s something else that’s kept you locked in your apartment for a week. You smell a little like alcohol, by the way. You’re not still drunk, are you?”

“N-… no.” I lower myself unsteadily back into the pew, gripping whatever is nearby until my knuckles are white just to try and steady myself, to try not to pass out. “No, I poured it out last night. Marco, do you…?”

He tilts his head, giving me that analytical squint. “Do I… remember?”

I nod. I’m still slack-jawed. 

“Of course, Jean.” He leans against the side arm of the pew and lifts his casted leg into my lap, and I adjust to him without thinking. My vision is swimming a little. “Is this about the thread thing?”

It’s hard to look at him straight on, so I just stare down at his cast. Plaster covers his leg down around his foot, probably over a good bit of his thigh, thick and restraining. I’m starting to feel extra shitty about that, on top of everything else. “How do you know about that?” My question is tiny, murmured, catching on my dry lips.

“Hospitals are boring. I talked to Christa when she wasn’t on the clock, and a little to Bertholdt and Reiner. They kind of… filled me in.”

“Did you remember before that?”

“When I woke up? Of course.” He gives a small laugh, completely devoid of humor. I flick my glance up to him, and he gives me this sad little smile. “Is this why you’ve been hiding for so long? You thought that I’d forget about you, just like that?”

I run a hand down my face, then stare up at the flat ceiling. Yeah, pretty much. Sounds dumb when you put it that way. Like such a simple set of words could ever possibly describe the feeling of being ripped apart after so brief a time being whole. 

Looking back at him, I’m sure my face is started to show the wear. The burning is back, and my eyes are swimming again, and his glasses are just barely lopsided on his nose, almost unnoticeable. 

“I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Yet here you are.”

Running my thumb lightly over the edge of his cast, I lean my head on my other arm, sprawled over the back of the pew. “Here I am.”

Neither of us speak for a while. What do we say? What do you say to the guy you just dragged screaming through the end of the world, then completely abandoned? If that’s not enough to turn him off of me, he’s probably more brain-damaged than he looks.

“The thread… what was it?” I glance up at him from the tiny circles I’d been tracing as I ask, and he looks up at me from playing with the ends of his vestment. I lick my lips, dropping my gaze to back to his cast. 

“Christa says it was from when I died. The first time. Whatever memory I clung to the most when I was scared. Like a keepsake in my wallet.”

“And I burned it.” I let out a slow exhale. “I’m sorry, Marco, I—”

“I don’t care about that,” he says, waving a hand. “It’s been gone for ten years. Why did you burn it, though? What did you think it was?”

I close my eyes again and sniffle. “Bitchface said it was everything you knew about me. All the memories.” I conveniently leave out all the other shit she said. “I thought if I burned it, maybe you could just… have a normal life where you’d left off, and you wouldn’t have to remember any of this.”

“And you think I’d want that?”

“It’d be better.”

“Jean,” he says firmly, and I look up at him again. “I’m a grown man. I’m the only one who can make decisions about what’s good for me.”

I balk for a while, fidgeting nervously, growing more agitated as I fuck this up more and more. “Are you pissed?”

“About that?”

“... And anything else, I guess.”

He sinks in his seat a little, resting his hands in his lap as he stares up at the ceiling. He thinks for a long time, and I use the time to memorize him again, the angle of his jaw, the steady rise of his breath, the tapping of his good fingers.

“I sort of always knew that you don’t make the best decisions, so I guess I can’t blame you. Like I said, it’s been gone a long time, and it wasn’t even much to begin with from what I can tell.” He looks back at me again. “I am mad, though.”

I shrink and nod, like a scolded child.

“I’m mad because you thought you could remove yourself that easily, and without asking me. I’m mad because you drank yourself half to death on the floor like… Kurt Cobain or something. I’m mad because you prefaced the most important thing I’ll ever hear with ‘I’m sorry.’”

Staring at him, I wrack my brain for whatever he’s referencing, thinking too far back to before he’d been ripped from my side.

“Don’t ever tell me you love me anywhere near an apology. Definitely never apologize for loving me.” He’s still stern, but it’s cracking, and his voice is wavering a little. Tears are starting to fill his eyes. “I won’t accept that. The only time I want to hear those two together is when you’re trying to wheedle out of getting in trouble for doing something small and stupid. Ten years from now, fifty, a hundred. When you’re still making incredibly shitty life choices, but you’re too old to make bad choices about anything except spending too much money on pudding.”

I think I’m laughing, but it could also be gross sobbing, because my face and collar are drenched with tears. He smiles, and tears fall down his face, and I want nothing more than to be an old man begging his forgiveness over a hundred and twelve ounces of pudding.

“I am sorry, though…” I murmur, sniffing again.

“For what?” Before I can open my mouth, he points at me. “Choose your words carefully.”

Good call. I bite my lip for a second, running my hand slowly over his cast, pushing his robes up over the plaster. “For this. For dragging you into all of this. For letting you die. For trying to shove you away.” I look up at him again, nervous and fidgety still. “And I really am sorry for… for that. Bad shit happens to people I love, and I just. I don’t know. I’m sorry for bringing that on you.”

Marco sighs through his nose, reaching for my fingers. I lift my hand to him, leaning closer, and he twines our fingers together tight, warmth spreading from his fingers through my chest. “I’m the one that followed you. I’m the one that decided to stay. I’m the one that stared all this in the face and didn’t run away.”

“Why’s that?” I run my thumb over his knuckles.

“Because being near you is worth enduring anything the universe can throw at me.” He gives me a watery smile, chuckling. “And I have pretty convincing evidence for that.”

I give him half a smile, curling toward him as best I can on the pew. “I’m still sorry.”

“Next time you try to tell me you’re sorry for loving me, I’m going to crack you over the head with this cast. It’s solid. Don’t tempt me.”

I blink slowly, tears coming to my eyes again, and the smile I give him is genuine. It feels good. The emptiness in my chest is being replaced with that dumb feeling I get when he makes me laugh. I want to kiss him. “Don’t you think I’m brain damaged enough?”

“I guess so, if you can’t tell that I was by your side because I wanted to be there, not because anything was forcing me.”

I nod, still not knowing where to go from here. What to do. I’m lost again, but I’m lost with him, and as long as he’s here I think I can make it through anything.

“So what do you say?” I peer back up at him as he asks, his face a wide smile. “Should we give it a shot?”

Moving his leg gently out of my lap and to the pew, I scoot slowly closer to him. He watches me, gaze moving over me and back to my eyes, finally free of that stomach-clenching fear again and just… Marco. Just Marco. I nudge the tip of my nose against his, reveling in being near to him, looking for flecks of gold in his dark eyes. There are so many, and they shine like little stars. I kiss him softly, my eyes fluttering shut. “If you’ll have me,” I whisper against his lips.

He hums quietly, leaning our foreheads together, his good hand coming to smooth up my back. “Say it again. Without the apology, okay?”

I lean back, bumping my nose against his, and I stare again stupidly into his beautiful doe eyes as I say, “I love you, Marco Bodt.”

He waits a beat, considering me, then sighs happily and gives me a little kiss.

“I love you, Jean Kirschtein.”

\--

The afternoon is spent curled up in his bed, which I’d never seen. Most of the walls are bookshelves, clearly an appropriated library, and the shelves overflow with books of all kinds. He doesn’t seem to have a computer, but fuck it. We don’t need one yet. 

The rain patters down against the one circular window set deep in the wall, and he lays on his back on the bed, one of the only comfortable positions for his leg. He’d threatened to bludgeon me if I apologize for the knee any more, too. (“I deserved it,” he’d said, his lips drawn tight and his brow furrowed, and I’d spent an age kissing that expression off his face.) 

We kiss lazily, hands warm on each other, wet hoodies and awkward robes tossed on the floor. The only pants he could manage over his cast were the sweats he’d stolen from me at some point, the ones he’d worn so long ago, and the way the leg is bunched up over the plaster near his hip makes me smile a little. I sprawl across him, holding my weight over him on one elbow until he rolls his eyes and pulls me down to him, twining our fingers tight. 

The time passes in a trickle of murmured nothings, trailing hands, and an unwillingness to leave each other’s lips, reverently whispered ‘I love you’s winding softly through the comfortable silence. I never thought I’d be the type to be able to just rest my forehead against someone’s and stare into their eyes, but when they’ve been mismatched and misplaced for so long I’m desperate to relearn them. To relearn him. I apologize for leaving him alone, and he thwacks me across the ass, but I stifle my soft laugh against his lips and he holds me tighter to him.

I’d be happy to stay here forever. I fit so well here, laying easily on his broad chest, my fingers running through his hair and over his freckles and everywhere I can possibly think to touch him.

He’s apparently got some sort of church function or something. I can hear them downstairs as the sun sets slowly, having broken through the clouds and now casting the room in a happy orange glow. They’re banging around beneath us in a room off the sanctuary and I’ve just managed to kiss him for what must be the thousandth time.

“Got a thing tonight,” he murmurs against my lips, his fingers tangling in my hair. I nuzzle his jaw, pressing soft kisses along the strong bone to his ear. 

“Skip it.”

“Can’t…”

“Why?”

“It’s the retirement home dance, Jean. They look forward to it.”

I wrinkle my nose, leaning above him again. “You’re gonna go hang out with old people while they awkwardly slow dance?”

“Yep.” Marco wraps his arms around me and gives me a grin I’m not entirely sure I’m okay with. “And you are too.”

I roll my eyes and drop my head to his chest, seeking refuge in the warmth of his neck. “Why me? I don’t know how to talk to old people.”

“I’ll get bored.”

“That’s why I’m saying skip it.” I kiss softly up his neck, gently enough to be construed as innocent, but definitely successful in its true aim, based on the shiver that runs through him. “You’re a priest, not a chaperone.”

“What is it that you think priests do?”

“Not this.”

“Well, that is where you’re wrong. Come on, I’ll get you a shirt and tie.”

I stare down at him, wide-eyed and mildly terrified, and he laughs long and loud and beautiful, and I just really don’t ever want to leave this spot. “Are you fucking kidding, Padre? No way! Why can’t I just wear this?”

“It’s a _dance_ , Jean.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Marco come on—”

His hand comes up and brushes against my cheek, his gaze softening. “Come on. It won’t be bad.”

The ‘whumpf’ I let out when I collapse back against him is more than enough surrender for him. Which is good. Because that’s all he’s getting.

\--

His shirt is too goddamn big for me. Even tucked deep into my scruffy jeans, almost wrapping down around my thighs, it sits on me like a freaking sheet. I feel ridiculous. I have no qualms informing him of such, but he just smiles and adjusts my tie. I pull him down by his, kissing him deeply and sweetly, and the way he slides his arms around my waist and holds me so close almost starts up the discussion of just skipping the damn old fart prom.

Clearly, though, Marco is not to be deterred. I’m leaning against the brick wall, furthest away from the crowd, hands stuffed in my pockets and resisting the urge to play with my crappy phone. There doesn’t appear to be a real theme here, aside from ‘whatever’s laying around the church.’ I make a note to ask later why Marco appears to have a warehouse load of fat-animal-themed decorations. 

He moves through the old people, smiling and talking to them and laughing at their jokes, and even from this distance I can tell that the warmth of his grin floods his eyes and radiates around him. He toddles around on his crutches, and people shuffle around him to allow him through. 

When he looks over at me, every single time, his eyes soften and his smile spreads wider. He’s so beautiful it makes my head spin. His love fills my chest with warmth and I’m almost dizzy with it, a little breathless. I just want him to myself again, to hold him and kiss every inch of him and tell him a million times how much I fucking love him. Even if I’m not grinning like a fool, he can see that from afar. The look on his face is intoxicating, and I don’t even bother looking around the room at this point. I just follow him with my eyes, idly playing with a fat little paper bee.

He comes over after a while, and I’d anticipated him and abducted a chair so he can sit next to my leaning spot. I could see him getting tired from the crutches. I take them from him wordlessly, leaning them against the wall, and he sits with a content sigh.

“You could get food, you know,” he says, running a hand through his hair as he looks up at me. I just shake my head wordlessly, which makes him laugh. “You have to eat at some point.”

“I photosynthesize.”

“It’s night time.”

“Well, shit,” I murmur, leaning down to press a kiss into his mussed, sweet-smelling hair. He just laughs again.

I lean against the wall again, and we look out at the crowd of old people dancing awkwardly together, watching them laugh and tell jokes, and I guess maybe this isn’t _that_ bad.

God, I must be going soft in my old age.

“Hey, Jean,” Marco says quietly, leaning his chin on his palm. He stretches his good leg out next to his cast, then looks up at me. I raise my eyebrows, waiting for him to continue. “Christa said something to me in the hospital, something about other worlds?”

I nod, chewing on my thumbnail. “Other timelines. Kinda like… yeah, alternate dimensions. Some things are different, some are the same, some aren’t alike at all. It all depends.”

He hums, stretching his arms over his head. I’m wondering where he’s going with this.

‘Come Fly With Me’ plays out and finishes before he speaks again.

“Do you think there’s other versions of us somewhere?”

I blink down at him, and he looks up at me, chewing idly on his lip. I consider it for a moment, scratching my cheek. It’s pretty stubbly. I bet I look like shit overall. Same old, same old. “What, like we exist in other universes?”

“Yeah.”

I smile a little, stuffing my hands back in my pockets before I shrug. “I dunno. Sounds kinda weird. It’s more likely than not, though.”

He looks back out at the couples dancing, humming in response.

“Why d’you ask?”

“I don’t know, just a thought I had.” He turns to me again and gives me a lopsided smile. He doesn’t elaborate, though, even when I reach down and run my thumb over the line of his jaw, then up over his cheek. He just leans into the touch, eyelids fluttering shut. He’s got a freckle right next to his left eye, almost hidden in his laughter lines.

“Not gonna share?”

He laughs, reaching up to lace his fingers with mine as he shakes his head. “It’s just not your style, I don’t think.”

“Try me.”

I swear to god he’s blushing when he looks up at me again, but it fades quickly. “I just feel like… even if I had forgotten, and even if you hadn’t come to find me…” He looks down at our twined fingers, then presses a few soft kisses to my knuckles. “No matter how big this city is, I think we’d find each other again somehow.”

I smile, running my free hand through his hair. “You think so?”

“Yeah.”

I laugh then, catching his implication. He’s right, it’s not my style, but fuck it. I can afford to believe in something new every now and again. Marco’s had that effect on me already. “You trying to say that the same goes for us in other universes?”

“Mhm,” he hums, resting his cheek against my hand, his thumb tracing over our laced fingers. “I think so. I’m allowed to believe in fate, right?”

“You can believe whatever you want,” I mumble, tilting his chin up to me again. I lean down to kiss him, tilting my head to fit us together closer, and he hums again. 

“What about you?” He asks quietly against my lips, his hand drifting up my wrist. 

“I’ll believe whatever brings you back to me,” I respond, almost too low to be heard over the noise of the music. Marco hears me, though, and he smiles, kissing me again, and a few more times.

“You wanna dance?”

I roll my eyes at him, but help him up, linking my fingers with his and sliding my other hand slowly around his waist to pull him close. He smiles and leans his forehead against mine, wrapping his other arm around my shoulders, careful not to unintentionally maul me with his cast.

‘What A Wonderful World’ comes on over the speakers, because it’s not quite gay enough that I’m dancing with my soul mate at fogey prom, and he smiles down at me, tender warmth in his eyes again, slow and patient.

“I love you,” I whisper, pulling him closer to me. Always closer. He smiles and closes his eyes, rubbing the tips of our noses together as he returns the sentiment. It passes over my lips in a sweet breath. I squeeze his hand gently, and we sway lazily to Louis’s deep rumbles.

Fate, huh?

I guess so.

So, to me, locked in all these bubbles scattered through time… I hope you have it as fucking good as I do.

__

The End.


	12. Welcome Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've come home.

I wake up early, and I don’t wake up afraid and panicked. Instead, I stare up at this ceiling that I’m slowly getting used to. Streetlight filters through the window instead of the sun. It must still be early.

Marco shifts next to me with a small noise, rolling on his side to throw his arm over me.

Turning toward him, I shift my arm under his pillow and move against him. He’s warm, breathing slowly, so relaxed. Peaceful. Looking at him soothes me.

When I reach up with my free hand and run my knuckles over his cheek, he smiles a little and leans into it.

“’S it morning yet?” His voice is thick and sleepy.

“Not yet. Couple hours still, I think.”

“Good,” he replies, but one of his eyes cracks open to meet mine. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I reply. Instantly and honestly. “I’m good.”

His eye closes again, content with my response, and he draws the tips of his fingers over my hip. His good leg shifts between mine, happily tangling our limbs to bring us yet closer. My knee brushes his brace, a thick, complicated thing that had replaced his cast. I don’t miss the cast, even though I had liberally covered it with messages and happy doodles and maybe a few tiny penises. The doctors say even if he heals as best he can, he’s gonna have to use a cane. Possibly for the rest of his life.

I don’t care. If he let me, I’d carry him around for the rest of all of our lives.

I run my fingers through his hair, still a little tangled from sleep and from riding the brains out of him last night. The little hum he lets out, a contented purr, inspires me to wrap my arm around his warm shoulders from under his pillow. Closer, closer, always closer.

“You’re perfect,” I mumble quietly, not really with the intent of him hearing me, but of course he does. Always listening.

“Maybe a little broken,” he replies softly.

“No,” I say immediately. He opens his eyes again, blushing, and gives me a lopsided smile. I press forward and brush my lips against his. Like always, he kisses me back, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to be happier than I am right now. I pull back just a tiny bit, just enough to murmur against his lips, “I love you.”

He waits for a moment. When the apology doesn’t come, I feel him smile and he kisses me again, so sweetly and gently and perfectly. Perfect Marco. “I love you,” he whispers. He pulls his other hand out from under himself, and when he reaches up, I lift my head so he can push his arm under my neck. 

He falls asleep, breathing slow and even, wrapped around me tight. I watch him sleep like a creeper. Apparently I fall asleep again too, though, because when I open my eyes again it’s brighter. Marco hasn’t moved. I lean forward and press another soft kiss to his lips, and maybe another dozen, although when I pull away again, he’s frowning a little.

“I think it’s raining,” he mumbles, shifting uncomfortably. I pause, not hearing the telltale sound of drops against the roof above us.

“You sore?” I nuzzle my nose against his and press a kiss to the tip as I run a hand down his side, down his hip, over the strappy brace. His skin is like a furnace. Always warm when he sleeps. He nods against me. “Sorry, baby. Want some drugs?”

He shakes his head. “Not more than I want to be here.”

“I’ll come back.”

He responds by wrapping around me tighter, like a starfish, and burying his face in my neck. I guess not, then. I just wrap my arm around his smooth waist in return, and he purrs against my throat.

I can always tell when Marco’s midway between being awake and asleep. He presses his hips closer to me and starts kissing down my neck, his lips lingering and warm and full of promise. I chuckle and rub my cheek against his hair. The draw of his fingers against my skin is just slow enough to send a shiver up my spine, enough to show his piquing interest. His cock, already more than halfway hard, nestles hot against the hollow of my hip, and he presses closer to rub it against me. I laugh softly and lean down to kiss his ear.

“Didn’t get enough last night, huh?”

“Never enough,” he murmurs, sucking lightly at my pulse. My body’s definitely taking interest.

“Good to know.”

Not like I can say any different.

He kisses slowly up my throat, nudging my head back so he can trail his lips up over my jaw, and I shiver again and roll my hips forward against him.

Whispering against my lips, he opens his eyes to stare into mine, dark and beautiful and half-lidded with want. “Want you inside me.”

I can’t really help the wolfish grin that passes over my face, but unfortunately I remember what day it is. I lean up to look at the clock over his shoulder, then collapse again on the pillow with a disgruntled noise. “Gotta go be holy in like half an hour, Padre.”

He groans and squeezes his eyes shut before he pulls away to rub at his eye. 

I lean over and nibble on his earlobe. He pulls at me with the arm around my shoulders, trying to get me to come closer, to press myself over him, but I shake my head and laugh quietly. “Nah,” I start, pitching my voice low and sultry in a way I know is gonna make him nuts. “Not enough time. Wanna take my time, build you up slow and good. Wanna thrust deep into you and drive you crazy and make you scream my name.”

He squints down at me, watching me purposefully lick my lips, and the little whine he lets out is both hot and hilarious. I grin, sliding my palm over his chest.

“You’re so mean,” he grumps, turning to kick his feet onto the floor. As he stretches, popping the kinks out of his back, I walk my fingers teasingly over his hip. He smacks at my fingers and stands. I’m rethinking making him wait, given the way his body moves across to the dresser. 

He gets dressed and ready, and I watch him the whole time, cuddled up in the warm spot he’d left. As he leaves, he leans down and kisses me softly, and I nibble on his lower lip just to bug him.

While he’s doing his thing downstairs, I fall asleep again, somewhere between planning out just how crazy I wanna make him and when I’m gonna do the grading for baby lab.

\--

It’s April now, and I’ve been living at the church with Marco for a few months. It’s easier on him. We’re thinking about moving back to my old place when he gets better, but we’re being lazy about planning that out. Cross that bridge when we come to it, that sort of thing.

I’ve quit smoking, too. Mostly because I taught Marco about classical conditioning. (You know, train the dog to drool when you ring a bell?) It was a concept he’d understood a little too well, so now instead of nicotine cravings I get blowjob cravings. Marco is more than happy to oblige me.

Baby lab refers to the freshman bio labs, and I guess I’ve whipped them into better shape than they came in. I only yell a little these days.

The next day, I roll into lab just a few minutes late, and I dump their hastily-graded reports on the desk. 

“You guys didn’t suck too bad last week,” I say as I collapse into my chair and rake my hand through my hair. “Continue to suck less this week.”

Of course I see the spirit hanging out in the corner nearest me, his eyes glued to the ceiling and his dry lips moving in silent muttering. I ignore him for now. 

None of my students seem to notice him, anyway, except for this mousey little dude whose eyes flick from me to the corner of the room rapidly, a pale sweatiness coming over his face. I know that look. I smirk at the kid, and his eyes widen impossibly further. 

After I tell him to stay after class, I stand up and start my lecture, paying less attention to my words than to the image of Marco grinning sleepily up at me this morning while I scrambled out of bed. I know my weird lovey grin must be spreading over my face, but fuck it. Let them think I’m real passionate about fetal pig vasculature. 

_“Gonna be late coming back, must debrief student on existence of supernatural,”_ I text Marco while the kids mutilate their pigs.

_“Please be nice this time,”_ he texts back. I smirk and kick my feet up on a stool.

_“Only if he is.”_

_“Jean!”_

_“Yeah, yeah. Need to make sure he gives me a good evaluation.”_

I slide my phone in my pocket and pull gloves on while I move across the room to rescue a particularly inept trio, smiling at the thought of the scolding he’s likely giving me. Even as I hold up the remains of the group’s pig, I can’t help but grin. 

Life’s not too bad these days.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Ghost Story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1528970) by [ZoeBug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug)




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